Abstract
Although self-relevance is widely acknowledged to enhance stimulus processing, the exclusivity of this effect remains open to question. In particular, in commonly adopted experimental paradigms, the prioritisation of self-relevant (vs. other-relevant) material may reflect the operation of a task-specific strategy rather than an obligatory facet of social-cognitive functioning. By changing basic aspects of the decisional context, it may therefore be possible to generate stimulus-prioritisation effects for targets other than the self. Based on the demonstration that ownership facilitates object categorisation (i.e., self-ownership effect), here we showed that stimulus prioritisation is sensitive to prior expectations about the prevalence of forthcoming objects (owned-by-self vs. owned-by-friend) and whether these beliefs are supported during the task. Under conditions of stimulus uncertainty (i.e., no prior beliefs), replicating previous research, objects were classified more rapidly when owned-by-self compared with owned-by-friend (Experiment 1). When, however, the frequency of stimulus presentation either confirmed (Experiment 2) or disconfirmed (Experiment 3) prior expectations, stimulus prioritisation was observed for the most prevalent objects regardless of their owner. A hierarchical drift diffusion model (HDDM) analysis further revealed that decisional bias was underpinned by differences in the evidential requirements of response generation. These findings underscore the flexibility of ownership effects (i.e., stimulus prioritisation) during object processing.
Highlights
For over four decades, research has revealed the benefits of self-relevance during stimulus processing
Analyses were conducted with the R package “lmer4” (Pinheiro et al, 2015), with Expectancy and Owner modelled as fixed effects and participants as a crossed random effect (Judd et al, 2012)
Compared with stimuli paired with other social targets, those associated with the self are privileged during decisional processing, a prioritisation effect that is argued to be restricted to self-relevant material. Challenging this assumption, using an object-ownership paradigm, here we showed that stimulus prioritisation was sensitive to prior expectations about the prevalence of forthcoming items and whether these beliefs were supported during the task
Summary
Research has revealed the benefits of self-relevance during stimulus processing. In a task probing the temporal order of stimulus presentation (i.e., prior-entry effect), Constable et al (2019) demonstrated that self-owned objects were reported to appear first more frequently than comparable items that belonged to the experimenter Taken together, these findings underscore the influence that ownership exerts during stimulus processing (Beggan, 1992; Kahneman et al, 1991; Morewedge & Giblin, 2015; Pierce et al, 2003). The composition of the sample of objects (i.e., the number of pencils and pens) was unspecified Under such conditions of stimulus uncertainty, it is possible that object relevance served as the most salient dimension of the task, thereby triggering a self-prioritisation effect that was grounded in an egocentric response-related bias (Epley & Gilovich, 2004). Had additional task-relevant details been available— information about the prevalence of the to-be-judged
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