The automatic and the expected self: separating self- and familiarity biases effects by manipulating stimulus probability

Abstract

Attentional control over prepotent responses has previously been shown by manipulating the probability with which stimuli appear. Here, we examined whether prepotent responses to self-associated stimuli can be modulated by their frequency of occurrence. Participants were instructed to associate geometric shapes with the self, their mother, or a stranger before having to judge whether the sequential shape-label pairs matched or mismatched the instruction. The probability of the different shape-label pairs was varied. There was a robust advantage to self-related stimuli in all cases. Reducing the proportion of matched self pairs did not weaken performance with self-related stimuli, whereas reducing the frequency of either matched mother or stranger pairs hurt performance, relative to when the different match trials were equiprobable. In addition, while mother and stranger pairs jointly benefitted when they both occurred frequently, there were benefits only to self pairs when the frequency of self trials increased along with either mother or stranger trials. The results suggest that biases favoring self-related stimuli occur automatically, even when self-related stimuli have a low probability of occurrence, and that expectations to frequent, self-related stimuli operate in a relatively exclusive manner, minimizing biases to high-probability stimuli related to other people. In contrast, biases to high-familiarity stimuli (mother pairs) can be reduced when the items occur infrequently and they do not dominate expectations over other high-frequency stimuli.

Super-capacity me! Super-capacity and violations of race independence for self- but not for reward-associated stimuli.

“…This does not nec essarily mean that the top-down settings from the label are based on conscious expectancies. In a recent article (Sui, Sun, Peng, & Humphreys, 2014) we showed that the self advantage remains in self-label matching even when participants have no expectancies for self-related stimuli, whereas biases for other people (e.g., for friend-related stimuli over stimuli linked to a stranger) disappear. Nevertheless, there is good'reason to think that the presence of the label does play a role in driving self bias effects with single stimuli.…”

Attentional control and the self: The Self-Attention Network (SAN)

“…In addition to this, Sui et al (2014) found that increasing the probability of the different pairings facilitated responses to all stimuli, compared with when the pairings had A c c e p t e d M a n u s c r i p t…”

Self-bias modulates saccadic control

“…Based on previous studies showing that participants can rapidly gain associations between the shapes and labels just after an association instruction (Sui et al, 2012(Sui et al, , 2014, we had participants perform 24 practice trials to reinforce associations between the letters and shapes trials where they indicated their responses ('match' or 'mismatch') by pressing buttons on a keyboard. After each trial they were provided with feedback on accuracy.…”

“…Information encoded in relation to the self tends to be better remembered and recollected than other information (Turk, Cunningham, & Macrae, 2008); people respond faster to their own faces rather than to those of others (Ma & Han, 2010;Theeuwes, Van der Stigchel, & Olivers, 2006); responses to their own objects are faster and more accurate compared to responses to objects owned by others (Turk, van Bussel, Waiter, & Macrae, 2011). Recently, the effects of self-biases have been found even in simple perceptual tasks (Sui, He, & Humphreys, 2012;Sui, Sun, Peng, & Humphreys, 2014). Specifically, in a task where participants associate simple geometric shapes with personal labels (you, friend, or stranger) and then immediately judge whether subsequent label-shape pairings matched, there are faster responses and higher perceptual sensitivity to self-associations compared with otherassociations (Sui et al, 2012).…”

“…By having people associate the shapes with social labels, the neutral geometric shapes are 'tagged' with social relevance (Sui et al, 2012). This procedure allows us study how basic perceptual processing for that shape changes when compared with other matched shapes (e.g., Sui, et al, 2014). They then saw displays in which the label appeared at fixation and the shape was presented at a peripheral location in either left or right visual field.…”