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

Abstract

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.