The cognitive advantage for one’s own name is not simply familiarity: An eye-tracking study

The ownership memory self-reference effect shifts recognition criterion but not recognition sensitivity

Information referenced to the self is retrieved more accurately than information referenced to others, known as the memory self-reference effect. It is unclear, however, whether social context (identity of the other) or task factors alter decision-making processes. In a virtual object allocation task, female participants sorted objects into their own or another's (stranger or mother) basket based on a colour cue. Subsequently, they performed a recognition memory task in which they first indicated whether each object was old or new, and then whether it had been allocated to themselves or to the other. We obtained owner-specific hit rates and false-alarm rates and applied signal detection theory to derive separate recognition sensitivity (d') and recognition criterion parameters (c) for self- and other-owned objects. While there was no clear evidence of a recognition self-reference effect, or a change in sensitivity, participants adopted a more conservative recognition criterion for self- compared with other-owned objects, and particularly when the other-referent was the participant's mother compared with the stranger. Moreover, when discriminating whether the originally presented objects were self- or other-owned, participants were biased toward ascribing ownership to the 'other'. We speculate that these findings reflect ownership-based changes in decisional processing during the recognition memory self-reference paradigm.

Do health warning labels on alcohol packaging attract visual attention? A systematic review

OBJECTIVES

To synthesize eye-tracking-based evidence on consumers' visual attention devoted to alcohol warning labels (AWLs) on alcohol packaging.

STUDY DESIGN

A systematic review was conducted and reported in accordance with the PRISMA guidelines.

METHODS

Two rounds of a literature search were conducted to identify relevant peer-reviewed articles and unpublished grey literature. While the first round (July 3 to August 21, 2023) was based on three electronic databases (PubMed, Web of Science, and PsycINFO), the second round (May 20 to 28, 2024) followed a multiple-step protocol that systematically searched the grey literature. Five criteria were applied to screen eligible articles. Using established quality control tools, the identified articles were assessed for overall quality and then for quality specific to the eye-tracking method.

RESULTS

Six published peer-reviewed articles were thus included in the current review along with one unpublished research paper from a doctoral thesis. This review paper summarizes earlier findings in terms of bottom-up (i.e., AWL design-related) factors such as size, color, surrounding border, and pictorial elements, and top-down (i.e., goal-driven) factors such as motivation to change drinking behavior and self-affirmation. The review found that people tend to pay very little attention to AWLs displayed on alcohol packaging, although there is mixed evidence as to the effectiveness of specific factors.

CONCLUSIONS

Further investigations using eye-tracking are needed to collect additional evidence on attention devoted to AWLs. Meanwhile, we put forward implications for policymakers and future avenues for research based on our review of the existing literature.

The role of attention in the emergence of the evaluative and incidental self-reference effects

The self-reference effect (SRE) is a memory advantage produced by encoding information in a self-relevant manner. The "evaluative" SRE arises when people engage in explicit self-evaluation/reflection to process to-be-remembered items, while the "incidental" SRE occurs when self-referential information (e.g., one's own name) is co-presented with to-be-remembered items but is irrelevant to a given task. Using a divided-attention paradigm, the present study examined potential differences in the attentional requirements of the evaluative and incidental SREs. During encoding, personality-trait words were presented simultaneously with the participant's own or a celebrity's name. The participants' task was either to evaluate whether each word described themselves/the celebrity (evaluative encoding) or to indicate the location of each word (incidental encoding), in the presence or absence of a secondary task. A subsequent recognition test with a remember/know procedure showed better overall recognition and enhanced episodic recollection for words presented with one's own name vs. another name, with this SRE being larger in the evaluative than incidental encoding condition. Critically, divided attention at encoding attenuated the magnitudes of both evaluative and incidental SREs to a comparable degree in overall recognition and episodic recollection. These findings suggest that both the evaluative and incidental SREs are resource-demanding, effortful mnemonic benefits.

Attention capture by own name decreases with speech compression

Auditory stimuli that are relevant to a listener have the potential to capture focal attention even when unattended, the listener's own name being a particularly effective stimulus. We report two experiments to test the attention-capturing potential of the listener's own name in normal speech and time-compressed speech. In Experiment 1, 39 participants were tested with a visual word categorization task with uncompressed spoken names as background auditory distractors. Participants' word categorization performance was slower when hearing their own name rather than other names, and in a final test, they were faster at detecting their own name than other names. Experiment 2 used the same task paradigm, but the auditory distractors were time-compressed names. Three compression levels were tested with 25 participants in each condition. Participants' word categorization performance was again slower when hearing their own name than when hearing other names; the slowing was strongest with slight compression and weakest with intense compression. Personally relevant time-compressed speech has the potential to capture attention, but the degree of capture depends on the level of compression. Attention capture by time-compressed speech has practical significance and provides partial evidence for the duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction.

Electrophysiological correlates of self-related processing in adults with autism

The term "self-bias" refers to the human propensity to prioritize self- over other-related stimuli and is believed to influence various stages of the processing stream. By means of event-related potentials (ERPs), it was recently shown that the self-bias in a shape-label matching task modulates early as well as later phases of information processing in neurotypicals. Recent claims suggest autism-related deficits to specifically impact later stages of self-related processing; however, it is unclear whether these claims hold based on current findings. Using the shape-label matching task while recording ERPs in individuals with autism can clarify which stage of self-related processing is specifically affected in this condition. Therefore, this study sought to investigate the temporal course of self-related processing in adults with and without autism. Thirty-two adults with autism and 27 neurotypicals completed a shape-label matching task while ERPs were concomitantly recorded. At the behavioral level, results furnished evidence for a comparable self-bias across groups, with no differences in task performance between adults with and without autism. At the ERP level, the two groups showed a similar self-bias at early stages of self-related information processing (the N1 component). Conversely, the autism group manifested a lessened differentiation between self- and other-related stimuli at later stages (the parietal P3 component). In line with recent claims of later phases of self-related processing being altered in autism, we found an equivalent self-bias between groups at an early, sensory stage of processing, yet a strongly diminished self-bias at a later, cognitive stage in adults with autism.

Differences in own-face but not own-name discrimination between autistic and neurotypical adults: A fast periodic visual stimulation-EEG study

Self-related processing is thought to be altered in autism, with several studies reporting that autistic individuals show a diminished neural response relative to neurotypicals for their own name and face. However, evidence remains scarce and is mostly based on event-related potential studies. Here, we used EEG to measure the neural activity of autistic adults (20 for faces, 27 for names) and neurotypical adults (24 for faces, 25 for names) while they were watching rapidly alternating faces and names, through a relatively new technique called Fast Periodic Visual Stimulation. We presented strangers' faces or names at a base frequency of 5.77 Hz, while one's own, a close other's, and a specific stranger's face/name was presented at an oddball frequency of 1.154 Hz. The neurotypical group showed a significantly greater response to their own face than both close other and stranger faces, and a greater response for close other than for stranger faces. In contrast, in the autism group, own and close other faces showed stronger responses than the stranger's face, but the difference between own and close other faces was not significant in a bilateral parieto-occipital cluster. No group differences in the enhanced response to familiar names were found. These results replicate and extend results obtained using traditional electroencephalographic techniques which suggest atypical responses to self-relevant stimuli in autism.

Put you in the problem: Effects of self-pronouns on mathematical problem-solving

Self-cues such as personal pronouns are known to elicit processing biases, such as attention capture and prioritisation in working memory. This may impact the performance of tasks that have a high attentional load like mathematical problem-solving. Here, we compared the speed and accuracy with which children solved numerical problems that included either the self-cue "you," or a different character name. First, we piloted a self-referencing manipulation with N = 52, 7 to 11 year-olds, testing performance on addition and subtraction problems that had either a single referent ("You"/"Sam") or more than one referent. We took into account operation and positioning of the pronoun and also measured performance on attention and working memory tasks. We found a robust accuracy advantage for problems that included "you," regardless of how many characters were included. The accuracy advantage for problems with a self-pronoun was not statistically associated with individual differences in attention or working memory. In our main study (9 to 11 year-olds, N = 144), we manipulated problem difficulty by creating consistently and inconsistently worded addition and subtraction problems. We found significantly higher speed and accuracy for problems that included "you." However, this effect varied by task difficulty, with the self-pronoun effect being strongest in the most difficult inconsistently worded, subtraction problems. The advantage of problems with a self-pronoun was not associated with individual differences in working memory. These findings suggest that self-cues like the pronoun "you" can be usefully applied in numerical processing tasks, an effect that may be attributable to the effects of self-cues on attention.

Taking Up the Challenge to Improve Name and Role Recognition in the Operating Room

ABSTRACT

The rise of the #TheatreCapChallenge in 2017, which saw participants donning surgical caps labeled with their names and roles, promises to be a seemingly simple intervention aimed at improving operating theater communication and patient safety. This narrative review strives to expand upon the perceived and studied benefits of this intervention and address potential concerns that have arisen with the use of these name and role-labeled surgical caps.

The relevance of familiarity in the context of self-related information processing

Humans are inclined to preferentially process self-related content, referred to as the "self-bias." Different paradigms have been used to study this effect. However, not all paradigms included a familiar other condition (but rather an unfamiliar other condition), needed to differentiate self-specific effects from the impact of familiarity. The primary goal of our study was to test the suitability for studying the self-bias of two paradigms that provide robust measures of salience effects-that is, the Repetition Blindness (RB) effect and the Emotional Stroop (ES) interference-while addressing the familiarity confound. We further explored whether self-bias effects were related to autism symptomatology, as a reduced self-bias in autism has been reported in previous research. In an online procedure, 82 adults performed an RB task and an ES task in a counterbalanced order, while being presented with both self- and familiar other-related stimuli. Results of both frequentist and Bayesian analyses did not provide evidence in favour of a specific self-bias on either task: we found no significant modulation of the RB effect, nor of the ES interference, for the own versus a close other's name. Moreover, no link with autism symptomatology was found. Tackling a crucial shortcoming from earlier studies, our investigation raises awareness on the importance of accounting for familiarity when investigating self-related processing.

A common self-advantage across the implicit and explicit levels for self-body recognition

Introduction

Although self-bias has been extensively studied and confirmed in various self-related stimuli, it remains controversial whether self-body can induce recognition advantage at the explicit level. After careful examination of previous experiments related to self-body processing, we proposed that participant strategies may influence explicit task outcomes.

Methods

To test our hypothesis, we designed a novel explicit task. For comparison, we also conducted classic explicit and implicit tasks.

Results

With the newly designed explicit task, we found clear and robust evidence of self-hand recognition advantage at the explicit level. Moreover, we found that there was a strong link between self-advantage found in the classic implicit task and the newly designed explicit task, indicating that the self-advantage processing by these two pathways may be linked.

Discussion

These findings provide new insights into the long-standing inconsistencies in previous studies and open a new avenue for studying self-bias using self-body stimuli.

The Influence of Personal Harmony Value on Temporal Order Perception

Empirical studies have demonstrated that self-relevant information affects temporal order perception. Therefore, the question arises of whether personal values-which are the core components of the self-influence temporal order perception. To explore this problem, we chose harmony, one of the most common values in Chinese culture, as the starting point. First, the harmony scale was used to measure the harmony values of the participants, and the participants were divided into high- and low-harmony groups. The validity of the grouping was then verified using an implicit-association test. Furthermore, two temporal order judgment (TOJ) tasks were used to explore the impact of harmony values on temporal order perception. The results revealed that in both TOJ tasks, participants in the high-harmony group tended to perceive harmonious stimuli before non-harmonious stimuli, while the effect was not found in the low-harmony group. We conclude that harmony values affect temporal order perception, and only if the values are important to the individual.

Equivalent own name bias in autism: An EEG study of the Attentional Blink

The "Attentional Blink" refers to difficulty in detecting the second of two target stimuli presented in rapid temporal succession. Studies have shown that salient target stimuli, such as one's own name, reduce the magnitude of this effect. Given indications that self-related processing is altered in autism, it is an open question whether this attentional self-bias is reduced in autism. To investigate this, in the current study we utilised an Attentional Blink paradigm involving one's own and others' names, in a group of 24 autistic adults, and 22 neurotypical adults, while measuring EEG. In line with previous studies, the Attentional Blink was reduced when the participant's own name was the second target, with no differences between autistic and neurotypical participants. ERP results show that the effect on the Attentional Blink of one's own name was reflected in increased N2 and P3 amplitudes, for both autistic and nonautistic individuals. This is the first event-related potential study of own-name processing in the context of the Attentional Blink. The results provide evidence of an intact attentional self-bias in autism, both at the behavioural and neural level.

Self-Hierarchy in Perceptual Matching: Variations in Different Processing Stages

People have three cognitive representations of the self, namely, the individual, relational, and collective selves (CS), which are indispensable components of selfhood but not necessarily given equal preference. Previous studies found that people displayed varied self-hierarchy in miscellaneous tasks involving different research materials that had pre-existing learned associations established over long periods of time. Therefore, this study tries to explore a purer self-hierarchy without the influence of research materials, using perceptual matching tasks. The behavioral and event-related potentials' (ERPs) findings showed that people recognized information association with their individual self (IS) faster compared with their relational (RS) and CS. Smaller N2, stronger P3 and late positive complex (LPC) amplitudes were evoked during IS compared with RS and CS. However, the three selves evoked equal P2 amplitudes at the early processing stage. Moreover, CS showed a weaker advantage than RS, demonstrating a longer reaction time, lower d prime, and weaker P3 and LPC amplitudes in the parietal region. Overall, self-hierarchy during simple perceptual processing manifested as IS > RS > CS at the late processing stage but manifested as IS = RS = CS at the early processing stage. Self-hierarchy varies according to the processing stage, even without meaningful information and during the simple perception processing. This result provides direct evidence that all selves can be tagged with neutral actions, which would fit the idea of an organism attuned to self-survival at multiple processing levels.

Distinct Effects of Stimulus Repetition on Various Temporal Stages of Subject's Own Name Processing

The self is one of the most important concepts in psychology, which is of great significance for human survival and development. As an important self-related stimulus, the subject’s own name (SON) shows great advantages in cognitive and social processing and is widely used as an oddball stimulus in previous studies. However, it remained unknown whether the multiple repetition of stimulus would have similar influence on the neural response to SON and the other names under equal probability. In this study, adopting EEG and an equal–probability paradigm, we first detected the SON-related ERP components which could differentiate SON from other names, and then investigated how these components are influenced by repeated exposure of the stimulus. Our results showed that SON evoked an earlier SON-related negativity (SRN) at the fronto-central region and a late positive potential (LPP) at the centro-parietal region. More intriguingly, the earlier SRN demonstrated reduction after multiple repetitions, whereas LPP did not exhibit significant changes. In conclusion, these findings revealed that multiple repetitions of the stimulus might influence the various temporal stages in SON-related processing and highlighted the robustness of the late stage in this processing.

The Hierarchical Relationship Between the Relational-Self and the Collective-Self During Attention Processing

Background

Under the Chinese collectivist cultural system, people emphasize social connections with close others and members of in-groups. Collectivism can be divided into the following two forms: relational collectivism (privileges relational self [RS]) and group collectivism (emphasizes collective self [CS]). Previous researchers have found a hierarchy between the RS and CS, resulting in different degrees of recognition advantages. However, the hierarchy between the RS and CS is unclear and may depend on the specific processing stage. Therefore, this research compared the hierarchy between these two selves during different processing stages using an eye-movement method.

Methods

The sample consisted of thirty-eight young adults aged between 18 and 24 years old (M = 20.45, SD= 1.62). Each participant finished a dot-probe task featuring high-relevant (HR, ie one’s mother’s name and China) and low-relevant (LR, ie, name of a famous person and USA) information about the RS and CS and neutral information. Further, the eye-movement (EM) indices were collected simultaneously.

Results

A stronger reaction time bias and longer total gaze duration revealed that young people in China focus more on RS information, indicating that Chinese people prioritize the RS over the CS at late stages of attentional processing.

Conclusion

Information on interpersonal relationships and information on the in-group both catch people’s attention quickly and easily, but only RS information can maintain attention for longer. Understanding the hierarchy of the RS and the CS may provide more evidence for self-construal in the Chinese collectivist cultural context. The importance of the RS prompting that the interpersonal and close relationships are more important to the development of the self, suggesting that it is necessary to pay more attention to the impact of interpersonal support on people’s mental health in clinical applications.

Self-related objects increase alertness and orient attention through top-down saliency

Attention is influenced by information about relationships between ourselves and the objects around us. Self-related objects can either facilitate or disrupt task performance, creating a challenge for identifying the precise nature of the influence of self-relatedness on attention. To address this challenge, we measured different components of attention (alertness and orienting) in the presence of self-related objects using a revised attention network task (ANT). In a self-association task, participants first learned colour-person associations and then carried out a colour-person matching task. This was followed by the ANT, in which these coloured boxes associated with self or friend were displayed as peripheral cues; participants had to judge the direction of an arrow flanked by congruent (low-conflict) or incongruent (high-conflict) distractors presented within one coloured box. The results showed faster and more accurate responses to targets appearing within the self-colour than friend-colour cues in the association task. In the ANT, the analysis of alertness revealed that self-related cues facilitated task performance compared with friend-related cues. The analysis of orienting demonstrated that relative to friend cues, self-cues hampered task performance in invalid trials. Critically, the effects of self-cues on both orienting and alertness were observed only in high conflict situations. These results indicated that self-related objects are powerful cues that enhance attention intensity, which either facilitates task performance when the upcoming target falls within their location or disrupts performance when the target falls outside their location. The data suggest that attentional functions can be tuned by self-saliency in high-demand contexts.

The roles of the LpSTS and DLPFC in self-prioritization: A transcranial magnetic stimulation study

The Self‐Attention Network (SAN) has been proposed to describe the underlying neural mechanism of the self‐prioritization effect, yet the roles of the key nodes in the SAN—the left posterior superior temporal sulcus (LpSTS) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC)—still need to be clarified. One hundred and nine participants were randomly assigned into the LpSTS group, the DLPFC group, or the sham group. We used the transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) technique to selectively disrupt the functions of the corresponding targeted region, and observed its impacts on self‐prioritization effect based on the difference between the performance of the self‐matching task before and after the targeted stimulation. We analyzed both model‐free performance measures and HDDM‐based performance measures for the self‐matching task. The results showed that the inhibition of LpSTS could lead to reduced performance in processing self‐related stimuli, which establishes a causal role for the LpSTS in self‐related processing and provide direct evidence to support the SAN framework. However, the results of the DLPFC group from HDDM analysis were distinct from the results based on response efficiency. Our investigation further the understanding of the differentiated roles of key nodes in the SAN in supporting the self‐salience in information processing.

A comparison of self-bias measures across cognitive domains

BACKGROUND

The 'self-bias'-i.e., the human proneness to preferentially process self-relevant stimuli-is thought to be important for both self-related and social processing. Previous research operationalized the self-bias using different paradigms, assessing the size of the self-bias within a single cognitive domain. Recent studies suggested a reduced self-bias in autism, yet findings are inconsistent. The lack of consensus across existing studies may result from variation in paradigms and cognitive domains tested. Therefore, the primary goal of the current study was to investigate whether self-biases found across cognitive domains (i.e., perception, memory, attention) are related or independent. The secondary goal was to explore the relationship between these self-biases and the extent of autistic traits in a neurotypical sample.

METHODS

In an online procedure, 99 Dutch-speaking adults performed three self-processing tasks in counterbalanced order-i.e., the shape-label matching task (perception), the trait adjectives task (memory) and the visual search task (attention)-and completed two self-report measures of ASD symptomatology, i.e., AQ-10 and SRS-A. To control for level of familiarity, self-, close other- and famous other-relevant stimuli were included in each task. Repeated measures ANOVAs were conducted for each task, and both frequentist as well as Bayesian analyses were applied to investigate the correlational patterns between self-bias measures.

RESULTS

We observed significant correlations of the self-bias magnitude between memory and attention, as well as attention and perception. However, Bayesian analysis provided only weak support for the latter association. Further, the size of the self-bias was not significantly related across memory and perception. No significant correlation between autistic traits and the self-bias magnitude was found for any of the three tasks, with Bayesian analyses strongly favoring the null hypothesis.

CONCLUSIONS

In contrast with the view of a 'unidimensional' self-bias, our findings provide evidence for a heterogeneous and multifaceted self consisting of a variety of related and unrelated aspects. None of the self-bias indices were found to relate to autistic traits in our neurotypical sample.

The impact of newly self-associated pictorial and letter-based stimuli in attention holding

Familiar self-associated stimuli such as one's own name and face are more efficient in guiding attention than other-associated stimuli. Remarkably, a short association of geometric shapes to the self versus others is sufficient to induce prioritization of the self- (vs. other-) associated shape in a matching task. Replications with other tasks measuring different stages of information processing, however, produced mixed results. It thus remains unclear whether the effect can be attributed to the newly associated stimulus alone. Therefore, in Study 1 (N = 28), we implemented the matching task and additionally compared the effectiveness of familiar versus newly self-associated stimuli with that of stranger-related stimuli to hold attention as cues in a dot-probe task. The self and the stranger were either represented by familiar labels ("I" vs. "stranger"), newly associated shapes, or shape-label pairs. In Study 2 (N = 31), participants associated nonwords to themselves and a stranger to compare the attentional impact of familiar and new self-associated letter combinations. Thus, we addressed the potential limitation due to modality present in former studies-which used mostly pictorial stimuli as new representations and letter combinations as familiar representations. Across both studies, in the dot-probe task, responses were faster towards targets following the self-associated stimuli compared with stranger-associated stimuli but only when familiar representations were used. Responses in the matching task were faster when confirming the correct self-associated pair. The results suggest that, under conditions of attentional competition, the prioritization of self-associated compared with other-associated cues does not generalize to newly associated stimuli.

The upside-down self: One's own face recognition is affected by inversion

One's own face is recognized more efficiently than any other face, although the neural mechanisms underlying this phenomenon remain poorly understood. Considering the extensive visual experience that we have with our own face, some authors have proposed that self-face recognition involves a more analytical perceptual strategy (i.e., based on face features) than other familiar faces, which are commonly processed holistically (i.e., as a whole). However, this hypothesis has not yet been tested with brain activity data. In the present study, we employed an inversion paradigm combined with event-related potential (ERP) recordings to investigate whether the self-face is processed more analytically. Sixteen healthy participants were asked to identify their own face and a familiar face regardless of its orientation, which could either be upright or inverted. ERP analysis revealed an enhanced amplitude and a delayed latency for the N170 component when faces were presented in an inverted orientation. Critically, both the self and a familiar face were equally vulnerable to the inversion effect, suggesting that the self-face is not processed more analytically than a familiar face. In addition, we replicated the recent finding that the attention-related P200 component is a specific neural index of self-face recognition. Overall, our results suggest that the advantage for self-face processing might be better explained by the engagement of self-related attentional mechanisms than by the use of a more analytical visuoperceptual strategy.

Breakthrough percepts of famous names

Studies have shown that presenting own-name stimuli on the fringe of awareness in Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) generates a P3 component and provides an accurate and countermeasure resistant method for detecting identity deception (Bowman et al., 2013, 2014). The current study investigates how effective this Fringe-P3 method is at detecting recognition of familiar name stimuli with lower salience (i.e., famous names) than own-name stimuli, as well as its accuracy with multi-item stimuli (i.e., first and second name pairs presented sequentially). The results demonstrated a highly significant ERP difference between famous and non-famous names at the group level and a detectable P3 for famous names for 86% of participants at the individual level. This demonstrates that the Fringe-P3 method can be used for detecting name stimuli other than own-names and for multi-item stimuli, thus further supporting the method's potential usefulness in forensic applications such as in detecting recognition of accomplices.

Does Self-Associating a Geometric Shape Immediately Cause Attentional Prioritization?

In many cognitive tasks, stimuli associated with one's self elicit faster responses than stimuli associated with others. This is true for familiar self-representations (e.g., one's own name), for new self-associated stimuli, and for combinations of both. The current research disentangles the potential of self- versus stranger-representations for familiar, new, and paired (familiar + new) stimuli to guide attention. In Study 1 (N = 34), responses to familiar and new self- versus other representations were tested in a dot-probe task with a short stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA; 100 ms). Study 2 (N = 31) and Study 3 (N = 35) use a long SOA (1,000 ms) to test whether the findings are mirrored in inhibition of return (IOR). We observe significant performance differences for targets following self- versus stranger-associated stimuli (i.e., a cuing effect or IOR depending on the SOA length), yet only when familiar representations are present. This indicates that, under conditions of attentional competition between self- and stranger-representations, familiar self-representations impact the distribution of attention while new self-representations alone do not.

The self-face captures attention without consciousness: Evidence from the N2pc ERP component analysis

It is well established that stimuli representing or associated with ourselves, like our own name or an image of our own face, benefit from preferential processing. However, two key questions concerning the self-prioritization mechanism remain to be addressed. First, does it operate in an automatic manner during the early processing, or rather in a more controlled fashion at later processing stages? Second, is it specific to the self-related stimuli, or can it be activated also by other stimuli that are familiar or salient? We conducted a dot-probe experiment to investigate the mechanism behind the attentional prioritization of the self-face image and to tackle both questions. The former, by employing a backwards masking procedure to isolate the early and preconscious processing stages. The latter, by investigating whether a face that becomes visually familiar due to repeated presentations is able to capture attention in a similar manner as the self-face. Analysis of the N2pc ERP component revealed that the self-face image automatically captures attention, both when processed consciously and unconsciously. In contrast, the visually familiar face did not attract attention, neither in the conscious, nor in the unconscious condition. We conclude that the self-prioritization mechanism is early and automatic, and is not triggered by mere visual familiarity. More generally, our results provide further evidence for efficient unconscious processing of faces, and for dissociation between attention and consciousness.

Simple budget-neutral tool to improve intraoperative communication

BACKGROUND

Communication failure is a common cause of medical errors and adverse events. Within the operating room (OR), there are many barriers to good communication, which can adversely affect patient outcome.

OBJECTIVE

Implementing a simple, cost-neutral tool aimed at improving intraoperative communication and engagement.

METHODS

Three anaesthesiology residents collected data using a data sheet and tailored surveys distributed to OR staff. Data were collected over a 2-week period in 2019, with 1 week each of preintervention and postintervention data collection. The intervention consisted of wearing OR caps displaying the first name and role of the anaesthesia resident clearly on the front.

RESULTS

A total of 20 data sheets and 48 preintervention and postintervention surveys were collected for a response rate of 57%. There was a statistically significant increase in OR staff knowledge of the anaesthesia resident's name (66% vs 100%, p=<0.001), an increase in the mean number of times the surgical providers addressed the anaesthesia residents (3.6 vs 7.8, p=0.0074) and an increase in the mean number of times the surgical providers addressed them by their first name (0.7 vs 4, p=0.0067). Comments received during the intervention were positive with overwhelming support.

CONCLUSIONS

This study demonstrated that a simple, cost-effective intervention can result in dramatic improvement in intraoperative communication and engagement between teams.

Self-related shapes can hold the eyes

Increasing evidence suggests that individuals are highly sensitive to self-related stimuli. Here, we report two experiments conducted to assess whether two schematic stimuli, arbitrarily associated with either the self or a stranger, can shape attention holding in an oculomotor task. In both experiments, participants first completed a manual matching task in which they were asked to associate the self and a stranger with two shapes (triangle vs. square). Then, in an oculomotor task, they were asked to perform a saccade from the centre of the screen towards a peripheral target while either the triangle or the square were centrally presented. In Experiment 1, saccades had to be performed on each trial-irrespective of the central shape-while in Experiment 2, saccades had to be performed only when the central shape was associated with either the self or the stranger, depending on block instruction. Participants were slower to initiate a saccade away from the central shape when this was associated with the self rather than with the stranger, but this pattern of results emerged only in Experiment 2. Overall, these data suggest that stimuli associated with the self through episodic learning can hold attention when the self/other distinction is a task-relevant dimension.

Self-prioritization of fully unfamiliar stimuli

Recently, Sui and colleagues introduced an experimental task to investigate prioritization of arbitrary stimuli associated with the self. They demonstrated that after being told to associate three identities (self, friend, stranger) with three arbitrary stimuli (geometrical shapes), participants were faster in a perceptual matching task to recognise matching pairs of self-associated shape with self-label, than respective friend or stranger-related pairings. They interpreted this as evidence that a brief self-association is sufficient to facilitate processing of previously neutral stimuli. However, in the matching trials of the self-prioritization task, participants are processing not only self-associated arbitrary stimuli but also familiar verbal labels with an established meaning. Therefore, the self-advantage may be caused by familiarity of the labels, rather than self-association of the shapes. To test whether self-prioritization can be elicited in a task employing exclusively neutral stimuli, we asked participants to associate avatar faces with three identities (self, name of best friend, and stranger) and replaced labels with unfamiliar abstract symbols that were associated to the words (you, friend, stranger) before the actual experiment started. The results presented the usual pattern of self-prioritization showing that this effect does not critically depend on the presence of familiar labels and that it can be elicited in the absence of any familiar stimuli.

I before U: Temporal order judgements reveal bias for self-owned objects

A multitude of studies demonstrate that self-relevant stimuli influence attention. Self-owned objects are a special class of self-relevant stimuli. If a self-owned object can indeed be characterised as a self-relevant stimulus then, consistent with theoretical predictions, a behavioural effect of ownership on attention should be present. To test this prediction, a task was selected that is known to be particularly sensitive measure of the prioritisation of visual information: the temporal order judgement. Participants completed temporal order judgements with pictures of "own" and "experimenter" owned objects (mugs) presented on either side of a central fixation cross. There was a variable onset delay between each picture, ranging between 0 ms and 105 ms, and participants were asked to indicate which mug appeared first. The results indicated a reliable change in the point of subjective simultaneity (PSS) in favour of their own mug. Such a change in the PSS was not observed for two groups of participants who were exposed to a mug but did not keep the mug. A further experiment indicated that the source of the bias in PSS was more consistent with a criterion shift or top-down attentional prioritisation rather than a perceptual bias. These findings suggest that ownership, beyond mere-touch, mere-choice, or familiarity, leads to prioritised processing and responses, but the mechanism underlying the effect is not likely to be perceptual in nature.

The ubiquitous self: what the properties of self-bias tell us about the self

People show systematic biases in perception, memory, and attention to favor information related to themselves over information related to other people. Researchers have examined these biases in order to throw light on the nature of the self. We review this evidence in memory, face recognition, and simple perceptual matching tasks through objective measures of self-biases. We argue that the self serves as a stable anchor across different forms of judgment and that referring a stimulus to ourselves enhances the binding of stimulus features at different stages of processing (e.g., in perception and in memory) and also the binding between processing stages. There is neural evidence that self-biases reflect an underlying neural network that interacts with but is independent of attentional control networks in the brain, and that damage to the self-related network disrupts the bias effects. We discuss the implications for understanding the nature of the self.

A Self-Reference Effect on Memory for People: We Are Particularly Good at Retrieving People Named Like Us

In the present study, it was evaluated whether one’s own name may produce a self-reference bias in memory for people. Results from Experiment 1 indicated that, in a verbal fluency task, participants recalled a greater number of known (familiar or famous) people with the same first name as their own than did paired participants, and vice versa. In the first experiment, paired participants knew each other but were not close. Experiment 2 examined whether this self-reference effect would still occur when the comparison target was a close other. This experiment showed that such a self-reference bias also occurred even when the paired persons were close (partners or very good friends). Overall the present paper describes a new naturalistic case of the self-reference effect.

Self-prioritization in vision, audition, and touch

To investigate self-prioritization independently of stimulus familiarity, Sui et al. (J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 38:1105-1117, 2012. doi: 10.1037/a0029792 ) introduced a new paradigm in which different geometric shapes are arbitrarily associated with self-relevant (e.g., "I") and neutral labels (e.g., "stranger"). It has now been repeatedly demonstrated that in a subsequently presented matching task, this association leads to faster and more accurate verifications of self-relevant shape-label pairings than neutral shape-label pairings. In order to assess whether this self-prioritization effect represents a general selection mechanism in human information processing, we examined whether it is limited to the visual modality. Therefore, besides visual stimuli, auditory and vibrotactile stimuli were also associated either to self-relevant or to neutral labels. The findings demonstrate that self-prioritization represents a general tendency influencing human information processing, one that operates across the senses. Our results also highlight a top-down component to self-prioritization.

Two Polarities of Attention in Social Contexts: From Attending-to-Others to Attending-to-Self

Social attention is one special form of attention that involves the allocation of limited processing resources in a social context. Previous studies on social attention often regard how attention is directed toward socially relevant stimuli such as faces and gaze directions of other individuals. In contrast to attending-to-others, a different line of researches has shown that self-related information such as own face and name automatically captures attention and is preferentially processed comparing to other-related information. These contrasting behavioral effects between attending-to-others and attending-to-self prompt me to consider a synthetic viewpoint for understanding social attention. I propose that social attention operates at two polarizing states: In one extreme, individual tends to attend to the self and prioritize self-related information over others', and, in the other extreme, attention is allocated to other individuals to infer their intentions and desires. Attending-to-self and attending-to-others mark the two ends of an otherwise continuum spectrum of social attention. For a given behavioral context, the mechanisms underlying these two polarities will interact and compete with each other in order to determine a saliency map of social attention that guides our behaviors. An imbalanced competition between these two behavioral and cognitive processes will cause cognitive disorders and neurological symptoms such as autism spectrum disorders and Williams syndrome. I have reviewed both behavioral and neural evidence that support the notion of polarized social attention, and have suggested several testable predictions to corroborate this integrative theory for understanding social attention.