Distinctiveness effects in self-prioritization

Abstract

The prioritization of self-relevant information has been shown in different selective-attention paradigms. Recently, in a new paradigm, formerly neutral material was associated with the self, a familiar person, or a neutral instance and, in a following matching task, the self-associated pairings were prioritized. To test whether this self-prioritization effect (SPE) might be explained by two different types of distinctiveness (distinctiveness due to self-relevance and distinctiveness due to differences in the stimulus material), we manipulated both types of distinctiveness asymmetries in this paradigm. Three experiments provide evidence that distinctiveness asymmetry due to semantic/grammatical differences influenced response times and signal detection rates. The data also show that the SPE remained reliable when controlling for the influence of grammatical distinctiveness. Thus, the results suggest that distinctiveness asymmetries do play a role in the matching paradigm, however, the SPE in the matching task is more than just the recoding of salient content.