Coupling social attention to the self forms a network for personal signifi cance (2013)

A colour version of Figure 12.2 appears in the plate section between pp. 280-281 Humans have the inherent ability to rapidly learn the social salience of a stimulus enhancing survival. There are a considerable number of studies on the effect of self-association in social psychology that have shown that there is enhanced importance assigned to self-associated objects (1), increased preference (2, 3), and stronger memory (4, 5). For example, by assigning participants to a specifi c team associated with specifi c symbols, participants typically rapidly orient their attention and prioritize the subsequent processing toward self-associated team members when asked to make social evaluations and allocate rewards (2, 3). These effects are not confi ned to high-level cognitive processes, however, Sui et al. recently demonstrated that self-associations with neutral geometrical shapes can rapidly alter perception (6), so that self-associated shapes are less affected by contrast reduction than shapes associated to other people. How this rapid perceptual effect of self-tagging emerges was investigated here.