Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The ‘Self’ has a prioritized cognitive status, attributed to an automatic bottom-up attentional enhancement for self-relevant stimuli. Two predictions follow if self-relevant information is automatically boosted. First, processing should be enhanced for self- compared to other-relevant targets. Second, interference should be greater for self- compared to other-relevant distractors. To investigate these predictions, we adapted a motion reproduction task. Participants first learned to associate a colour (blue, pink) with themselves and a stranger (other), then viewed a label (YOU or OTHER) and two different coloured superimposed random dot kinematograms (RDKs; blue, pink). A response dial recorded participants’ reproduced direction of motion for the coloured RDK associated with the presented label. Facilitation and interference for self- and other-labelled features was assessed by the angular difference between the reported and true direction of motion (signed error magnitude). There was a small, but reliable response bias in direction of distractor motion showing that attentional selection was imperfect. Further regression-based analyses quantified the degree to which self and other-related stimuli influenced responses (decision weights). As predicted, decision weights for target stimuli showed a significant advantage for self- compared with other-relevant motions. By contrast distractor weights did not differ significantly between self- and other-relevant features, suggesting self-relevance did not modulate the degree of interference and self-relevant stimuli did not automatically capture attention. Overall, we show that feature-based attention is enhanced for self-associated sensory input, but only when task-relevant.