Self-Prioritization in Perception RUNNING HEAD: Self-Prioritization in Perception Self-prioritization beyond perception Sarah Schäfer1, Dirk Wentura2, & Christian Frings1 1 University of Trier, 2 Saarland University Word count main text (5321 words) Correspondence: Christian Frings University of Trier Cognitive Psychology D-54286 Trier, Germany
[email protected] 1 Self-Prioritization in Perception Abstract Recently, Sui and colleagues (2012) introduced a new paradigm to measure perceptual self-prioritization processes. It seems that arbitrarily tagging shapes to self-relevant words (I, my, me, and so on) leads to speeded verification times when matching self-relevant word shape pairings (e.g., me – triangle) as compared to non-self-relevant word shape pairings (e.g., stranger – circle). In order to analyze the level at which self-prioritization takes place we analyzed whether the self-prioritization effect is due to a tagging of the self-relevant label and the particular associated shape or due to a tagging of the self with an abstract concept. In two experiments participants showed standard self-prioritization effects with varying stimulus features or different exemplars of a particular stimulus category suggesting that self- prioritization also works at a conceptual level. Keywords: self-prioritization, feature variance, conceptual processing 2 Self-Prioritization in Perception A function of self-relevance is that it guides our attention and behavior as self-relevant stimuli indicate important sensory inputs for our cognitive system. Accordingly, modulations of attentional processing due to self-relevance has been shown in different paradigms of selec- tive attention (e.g., Alexopoulos, Muller, Ric, & Marendaz, 2012; Bargh, 1982; Giesbrecht, Sy, & Lewis, 2009; Shapiro, Caldwell, & Sorensen, 1997).