Search

Previous research on cross-culture comparisons found that Western cultures tend to value independence and the self is construed as an autonomous individual, while Eastern cultures value interdependence and self-identity is perceived as embedded among friends and family members (Markus and Kitayama, 1991). The present experiment explored these cultural differences in the context of a paradigm developed by Sui et al. (2012), which found a bias toward the processing of self-relevant information using perceptual matching tasks. In this task, each neutral shape (i.e., triangle, circle, square) is associated with a person (i.e., self, friend, stranger), and faster and more accurate responses were found to formerly neutral stimuli tagged to the self compared to stimuli tagged to non-self. With this paradigm, the current study examined cross-cultural differences in the self-bias effect between participants from Hong Kong and the United Kingdom. Results demonstrated a reliable self-bias effect across groups consistent with previous studies. Importantly, a variation was identified in a larger self-bias toward stranger-associated stimuli in the United Kingdom participants than the Hong Kong participants. This suggested the cultural modulation of the self-bias effect in perceptual matching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People preferentially attend to external stimuli that are related to themselves compared with others. Whether a similar self-reference bias applies to internal representations, such as those maintained in working memory (WM), is presently unknown. We tested this possibility in four experiments, in which participants were first trained to associate social labels (self, friend, stranger) with arbitrary colors and then performed a delayed match-to-sample spatial WM task on color locations. Participants consistently responded fastest to WM probes at locations of self-associated colors (Experiments 1–4). This self-bias was driven not by differential exogenous attention during encoding or retrieval (Experiments 1 and 2) but by internal attentional prioritization of self-related representations during WM maintenance (Experiment 3). Moreover, self-prioritization in WM was nonstrategic, as this bias persisted even under conditions in which it hurt WM performance. These findings document an automatic prioritization of self-referential items in WM, which may form the basis of some egocentric biases in decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examined whether self-biases in perceptual matching reflect the positive valence of self-related stimuli. Participants associated geometric shapes with either personal labels (e.g., you, friend, stranger) or faces with different emotional expressions (e.g., happy, neutral, sad). They then judged whether shape–label or shape–face pairs were as originally shown or re-paired. Match times were faster to self-associated stimuli and to stimuli associated with the most positive valence. In addition, both the self-bias and the positive emotion bias were reliable across individuals in different test sessions. In contrast there was no sign of a correlation between the self-bias and the emotion-bias effects. We argue that self-bias and the bias to stimuli linked to positive emotion are separate and may reflect different underlying processes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There are established effects of self- and reward-biases even on simple perceptual matching tasks [Sui, J., He, X., & Humphreys, G. W. (2012). Perceptual effects of social salience: Evidence from self-prioritization effects on perceptual matching.Journal of Experimental Psychology, Human Perception and Performance, 38, 1105–1117]; however we know little about whether these biases can be modulated by particular interventions, and whether the biases then change in the same way. Here we assessed how the biases alter under conditions designed to induce negative mood. We had participants read a list of self-related negative or neutral mood statements [Velten, E. (1968). A laboratory task for induction of mood states.Behavior Research and Therapy, 6, 473–482] and also listen for 10 min to a passage of negative or neutral music, prior to carrying out perceptual matching with shapes associated to personal labels (self or stranger) or reward (£12 or £1). Responses to the self- and high-reward-associated shapes were selectively slower and less sensitive (d′) following the negative mood induction procedures, and the decrease in mood correlated with decreases in the reaction time bias across “high saliency” (self and high-reward) stimuli. We suggest that negative mood may decrease self- and reward-biases through reducing attention to salient external stimuli. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although there is strong evidence that human decision-making is frequently self-biased, it remains unclear whether self-biases mediate attention. Here we review evidence on the relations between self-bias effects in decision-making and attention. We ask: Does self-related information capture attention? Do self-biases modulate pre-attentive processes or do they depend on attentional resources being available? We review work on (1) own-name effects, (2) own-face effects, and (3) self-biases in associative matching. We argue that self-related information does have a differential impact on the allocation of attention and that it can alter the saliency of a stimulus in a manner that mimics the effects of perceptual-saliency. However, there is also evidence that self-biases depend on the availability of attentional resources and attentional expectancies for upcoming stimuli. We propose a new processing framework, the Self-Attention Network (SAN), in which neural circuits responding to self-related stimuli interact with circuits supporting attentional control, to determine our emergent behavior. We also discuss how these-bias effects may extend beyond the self to be modulated by the broader social context—for example, by cultural experience, by an in-group as opposed to an out-group stimulus, and by whether we are engaged in joint actions. Self-biases on attention are modulated by social context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We report two experiments showing that dynamically orienting our own face facilitates the automatic attraction of attention. We had participants complete a cueing task where they had to judge the orientation of a lateralized target cued by a central face that dynamically changed its orientation. Experiment 1 showed a reliable cueing effect from both self- and friend-faces at a long stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), however, the self-faces exclusively generated a spatial cueing effect at a short SOA. In Experiment 2, event-related potential (ERP) data to the face cues showed larger amplitudes in the N1 component for self-faces relative to friend- and unfamiliar-faces. In contrast, the amplitude of the P3 component was reduced for self compared with friend- and unfamiliar-other cues. The size of the self-bias effect in N1 correlated with the strength of self-biases in P3. The results indicate that dynamic changes in the orientation of one’s own face can provide a strong ecological cue for attention, enhancing sensory responses (N1) and reducing any subsequent uncertainty (P3) in decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The perceptual matching of shapes and labels can be affected by both self- and reward-biases when shapes are linked either to labels referring to particular individuals (you, friend, stranger) or to different reward values (£8, £2, £0). We investigated the relations between these biases by varying the reward value associated with particular shape–label pairs (circle–you, square–friend, triangle–stranger). Self shape–label pairs (circle–you) always received no reward, while friend shape–label pairs (square–friend) received high reward and stranger shape–label pairs low reward (triangle–stranger), or the reverse (friend—low reward; stranger—high reward). Despite receiving no reward, responses to self-related pairs were advantaged relative to those to low-reward stimuli and did not differ from those to high-reward items. There was also an advantage for responses to high-reward friend pairs relative to low-reward stranger stimuli, and for high-reward stranger stimuli compared to low-reward friends. Correlations across individuals were found across trial blocks for both the self-advantage and the high-reward advantage, but the self- and reward-advantages were uncorrelated. This suggests that the self- and reward-advantage effects have different origins. In addition, the magnitude of the self-advantage varied according to the rated personal distance between a participant and a stranger. For individuals manifesting a close personal distance to strangers, the self-advantage was smaller, and sensitivity to reward influenced the difference between the self- and high-reward conditions. For individuals manifesting a large personal distance to strangers, sensitivity to reward did not affect self-matching. We suggest that self-advantages on perceptual matching arise independent of reward for individuals with a large personal distance to strangers. On the other hand, in individuals with a weak self-bias, high reward and the self modulate a common subjective value system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent research has discovered a robust bias towards the processing of self-relevant information in perceptual matching. Self-associated stimuli are processed faster and more accurately than other-associated stimuli. Priming of independent or interdependent self-construal can dynamically modulate self-biases in high-level cognitive tasks. This study explored whether priming of independent/interdependent mindsets can modulate the self-bias effect in perceptual matching. In two experiments, British participants performed a priming task (Experiment 1 using a word-search task—an implicit priming approach, Experiment 2 with a reflective thinking task—an explicit priming method) immediately followed by a perceptual matching task, where they first learned to associate geometric shapes with labels (e.g., circle is you, square is friend, triangle is stranger) and then made judgments on whether shape-label pairs displayed on-screen were the correct associations or not. The analysis in Experiment 1 revealed that priming the interdependent self-construal led to a reduced self-bias effect in perceptual matching in participants who had low bias compared to those with high bias in the neutral/non-priming condition. In contrast, priming the independent self-construal did not modulate the self-bias in perceptual matching. The effects were replicated in Experiment 2. The results indicate that the self is a dynamic concept that can modulate perceptual processing by accessing different cultural contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is abundant evidence of a self-bias in cognition, with prioritised processing of information that is self-relevant. There is also abundant evidence of a positivity-bias in cognition, with prioritised processing of information that is positively valenced (e.g., positive emotional expressions, rewards). While the effects of self-bias and positivity-bias have been well documented in isolation, they have seldom been examined in parallel, so it is unclear whether one or other of these stimulus classes is prioritised or whether they interact. Addressing this gap, the current research aimed to establish the relative primacy of self-bias and positivity-bias using a classification task that paired self-relevant information with emotional expressions (i.e., Expt. 1) or reward information (i.e., Expt. 2). When the self was paired with relatively more positive information (i.e., smiling faces or high reward) we found evidence of a self-bias but no evidence of a positivity-bias. Whereas when the self was paired with relatively less positive information (i.e., neutral faces or low reward) we found evidence of a positivity-bias but no evidence of a self-bias. These results suggest the relative primacy of prioritised processing is flexible, context dependent and might be caused by a drive towards self-enhancement and the self-positivity bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has demonstrated that in-group favouritism occurs not only in higher-level judgments such as reward allocation, but also in low-level perceptual and attentional tasks. Recently, Moradi, Sui, Hewstone, and Humphreys (2015) found a novel effect of in-group bias on a simple perceptual matching task in which football fans responded more efficiently to stimuli newly associated with their own football team than stimuli associated with rival or neutral teams. This result is consistent with a robust self-bias effect in which individuals show a large performance advantage in responding to stimuli associated with the self over stimuli associated with a close friend or a stranger (Sui, He, & Humphreys, 2012). The present research utilised a perceptual matching paradigm to investigate the relations between self and in-group prioritisation amongst a sample of college rowers. Across two experiments, we demonstrated a reliable performance advantage for self and team stimuli. We also found a relationship between the self and team advantage in RT, and demonstrated an overlap in the perception of self- and team-associated shapes that was stronger in participants who reported a greater sense of group identity with their team. Further, we found no relation between the team bias and positive valence implicitly associated with the team, showing that the team bias effects are unlikely to be driven by emotional significance. The results are consistent with an overlap between self and in-group representation, which may provide evidence for a common process driving both self and in-group perceptual advantage effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four experiments tested whether self- and friend-biases in perceptual matching are modulated by whether stimuli are presented aligned with the participant's body and seen from the same perspective (the embodied perspective). Participants associated three colours (blue, green, and red) with three people (self, friend, and stranger) and then judged if a pairing of a colour and a personal label matched. The colour was painted on the T-shirt of an avatar. We modulated the perspective of the avatar along with its alignment with the participant's body. In Experiment 1 a single avatar appeared. In Experiments 2-4 there were two avatars, and we varied the social communicative environment between the two avatars (social vs. non-social in Experiments 2/4 vs. 3) and the distance between the two avatars and fixation (close, far, or equal in Experiment 2, 3 or 4). With a single avatar, performance on friend-match trials selectively improved when the avatar was aligned with patient's body and viewed from the participant's (first-person) perspective. The self-bias effect was unaffected by the perspective/embodiment manipulation and it was strong across all conditions. However with two avatars performance on both self- and friend-match trials improved when the target stimulus appeared on the avatar adopting a first person perspective and aligned with the participant's body, when two avatars were shown in a social-communicative context. These selective improvements disappeared when two avatars turned their back on one another in a non-communicative setting. The data indicate that self- and friend-biases in perceptual matching are modulated by both how strongly stimuli align with the participant's perspective and body, and the social communicative situation. We suggest that self-biases can reflect an embodied representation of the self coded from a first-person perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]