How prioritized is self-prioritization during stimulus processing?

ABSTRACT

Recent research has suggested that self-relevance automatically enhances stimulus processing (i.e., the self-prioritization effect). Notably, information associated with one’s self elicits faster responses than comparable material associated with other targets (e.g., friend, stranger). Challenging the assertion that self-prioritization is an obligatory process, here we hypothesized that self-relevance only facilitates performance when task sets draw attention to previously formed target-object associations. The results of two experiments were consistent with this viewpoint. Compared with arbitrary objects owned by a friend, those owned by the self were classified more rapidly when participants were required to report either the owner or identity of the items (i.e., semantic task set). In contrast, self-relevance failed to facilitate performance when participants judged the orientation of the stimuli (i.e., perceptual task set). These findings demonstrate the conditional automaticity of self-prioritization during stimulus processing.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-relevance
• self-prioritization
• ownership
• automaticity
• task sets

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Processing the identity of the objects would be sufficient to activate the complete event file (i.e., target-object association; Frings, Rothermund, & Wentura, 2007; Hommel, 2004), hence trigger self-prioritization.

2 Based on related research (Golubickis et al., 2018), G*Power revealed a requirement of 36 participants for each experiment. An additional ∼10% were recruited to allow for drop out.