Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2024-06-20
Abstract： The self plays a significant role in shaping social interactions, often capturing attention due to an inherent preference for stimuli related to the self. However, the mechanisms that govern attention in this context remain not fully elucidated. Research has suggested that the self holds social salience, potentially underpinning the prioritization of self-related information in attentional processes. Yet, other studies indicate that the self may not bias attention as automatically as physiologically salient stimuli, implying that self-related cues do not influence attention at an early, pre-attentive stage. We hypothesize that the self might enhance the salience of meaning post the initial perceptual phase, rather than affecting spatial prominence at an early stage. The current study is designed to investigate how neutral stimuli linked to an individual’s self impact selective attention processing, thereby illuminating the mechanisms of self-biased attentional processes. We conducted three experiments, each enlisting 24-25 college students. Initially, participants were engaged in an associative learning task, where they associated labels for themselves (’you’), familiar others (’friend’), or strangers (’stranger’) with neutral colors (Experiments 1 and 2) or abstract symbols (Experiment 3). Subsequently, they were tasked with identifying which labels matched the given neutral stimuli. We then employed the dual-rectangle cuing paradigm to distinguish between space-based and object-based attention, with the neutral stimuli serving as the target-irrelevant dimension, allowing us to examine the influence of self-association on selective attention. In addition to behavioral responses, we utilized the Hierarchical Drift Diffusion Model (HDDM) to dissect the decision-making process. Experiment 1 revealed that processing associated with the self primarily affects object-based selective attention. The object-based effect—calculated by the difference between the same and different object conditions—was diminished or absent when targets contained self- or friend-associated stimuli, compared to those with stranger-associated stimuli. However, the space-based effect—determined by the difference between valid and invalid cueing conditions—did not significantly vary among the three social identities. Experiment 2 replicated this finding, even when the associative learning context was different from the cueing task, thereby ruling out the impact of context familiarity. Experiment 3, which used abstract symbols for identity association and colors for task stimuli in the cueing task, did not find a significant effect of self-related information on object-based attention. Further analysis indicated that the influence of self-association on object-based attention was only evident among participants with longer reaction times. These results suggest that the activation of self-representation can be essential for modulating object-based attention. Moreover, the HDDM analysis indicated that the impact of self-related information on object-based selective attention predominantly occurs during the stimulus encoding stage. In conclusion, this study demonstrates that self-associated stimuli, when task-irrelevant, regulate object-based selective attention over space-based selective attention, consistently across varying experimental contexts. This research uncovers a critical distinction between object-based and space-based attention in the realm of self-associated processing, offering new insights into the complex dynamics of attentional mechanisms related to the self. It not only deepens our understanding of the self’s influence on cognitive processes but also paves the way for future explorations in this domain.
Peer Review Status:
Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2021-01-28
Abstract： Developmental motor disorders are the common feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Through a systematic review of the neuroscience literature, it is found that the alteration in the concentration of GABA and of serotonin and the abnormal expression of GABA-related protein and of shank protein led to not only the defects of the development of the central nervous system but also the synaptic excitation/inhibition imbalance, thus in turn resulting in the changes of the functional connectivity between cerebellum and motor cortex in children with ASD. The abnormalities in the structure of the cerebellum, basal ganglia, and corpus callosum had a negative impact on the whole-brain connectivity in children with ASD. The disorders in neurobiochemical mechanisms and the abnormalities of brain structure together triggered abnormal brain function of children with ASD, which ultimately resulted in developmental motor disorders. In addition, the common neural basis shared by the developmental motor disorders and the core symptoms of ASD mainly included the mirror neuron dysfunction, the abnormalities of the thalamus, the basal ganglia, the cerebellum and mutations of SLC7A5 and PTEN. Future researches need to focus on other neurotransmitters closely related to motor, such as acetylcholine and dopamine, to explore the dynamic mechanism and formation of the neural network of developmental motor disorders, and to analyze the interaction between the underlying neural mechanisms of motor developmental disorders and that of core symptoms of autism.
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2019-03-12
Abstract： Phonograms are comprised of a semantic radical and a phonetic radical. The semantic radical usually implies the meaning of a character, while the phonetic radical offers a phonetic clue for the pronunciation of a character. Prior research has indicated that semantic and phonetic radicals each play an important role in phonogram cognition. However, the way in which the 2 kinds of radicals combine to influence both phonogram recognition and the activation process remains a controversial topic. Neighborhood size is one of the most important characteristics of radicals. The differences induced by the neighborhood size of radicals are called neighborhood effects. Prior studies employed various methods to investigate the roles of semantic and phonetic radicals on phonogram recognition and discovered that phonetic radicals have an advantage in phonogram processing. They also found that the neighborhood size of semantic radicals regulated the relative contributions of semantic and phonetic radicals. However, most of these researchers investigated the roles of semantic and phonetic radicals respectively. Only a few investigators have focused on the comprehensive role of semantic and phonetic radicals in character processing. This study attempted to investigate the comprehensive effect of semantic and phonetic radicals on phonogram recognition. Participants’ brain responses were recorded using event-related brain potentials. Four types of characters were selected: HH (phonogram comprised of a high-frequency semantic radical and a high-frequency phonetic radical), HL (phonogram comprised of a high-frequency semantic radical and a low-frequency phonetic radical), LL (phonogram comprised of a low-frequency semantic radical and a low-frequency phonetic radical), and LH (phonogram comprised of a low-frequency semantic radical and a high-frequency phonetic radical). A lexical decision task was adopted; the frequency of the entire character and the number of strokes were equivalent for all groups. The results showed that, for characters with high-frequency semantic radicals (HH and HL), the characters with high-frequency phonetic radicals (HH) elicited a larger P200 waveform component than the characters with low-frequency phonetic radicals (HL). However, for characters with low-frequency semantic radicals (LH and LL), there was no significant difference between the characters with high-frequency phonetic radicals (LH) and those with low-frequency phonetic radicals (LL). Characters with high-frequency phonetic radicals (HH and LH) elicited a larger N400 component than those with low-frequency phonetic radicals (HL and LL), and the N400 differences induced by the neighborhood size of phonetic radicals with high-frequency semantic radicals (HH and HL) were larger than those induced by characters with low-frequency semantic radicals (LH and LL). These results indicate that in the early stage of phonogram recognition, the neighborhood effect of phonetic radicals is regulated by the neighborhood size of semantic radicals. In the late stage of phonogram recognition, the higher the frequency of phonetic radicals, the stronger the semantic activation degree of the character. In general, the neighborhood size of phonetic radicals was found to affect vocabulary accessibility. However, the effect of the neighborhood size of phonetic radicals is regulated by the neighborhood size of semantic radicals. "
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