The Modulation Of Self-related Information In Visual Selection

It has been well documented that that personal significance modulates the high-level cognitiveprocesses, including face recognition, memory and thinking. Whetherpersonal significance (i.e., theself-salience) modulates the visual selection remains poorly understood, however. Here by combiningrecent developed self-associative learning approach and a global-local task, this studypresents the evidencethat self-salience impacted on visual selection by modulatingthe effect of global advantage.Thiseffectconsistently occurred in both divided and focused attention tasks. In contrast, this was not thecase for friend-associations.The present study reported4studies to test wehther and how the self-salienceaffectedthe selection of attention at both behavioral and neural levels.Wefirst developed threeexperimentsto measure wether self related information modulated the globaladvantage effect when it was used as target vs. distractorin divided attention task and focused attentiontasks in order to create a behavioral marker on the effect of social salience on attentional selection. In eachexperiment participants carried out two tasks–a self-associative learning task following by a global-localtask. The results in study1showed faster responses to global than local (a global advantage effect)targetswhen both the self-or friend-associated shapes weretargetsand a stranger-associated shapes appreared asdistractors. In contrast, there was no global advantage to stranger-associated shapes in the presence ofself-related distractors while the global advantage effect to stranger-associated shapes survived in thepresence of friend-related distractors. This interference effect of self-salience was verified in the focusedattention task.In study2,by comparing divided attention and focused attention as within subject variable, we testedthe relation between self-salience and attention levels (focus vs. divided attention). The results on reactiontimesin study2indicated an enhanced interference effect in the divided than focus attention tasks whenself-associated shapes appeared as distractors.The enhanced interference effect was measures in Study3by employing ERPtechnique, in order tomeasure how early the interference effect in visual selection occurs in the brain. The result found that theglobal advangtage of oscillation amplitude took place in the early ERP components P1and N1. Incontrast,The intereference effect of self associated shapeson visual selction occurred in N1. The dataindicated that the modulation of self related in visual search turn out in the early primary visual processstage.In order to investagete theneuralbasisunderlying the modulation of self related information inglobal/local process, in Study4we adopted fMRI technique recording the brain activition when participantscarried out a global-local task in an divided attention task. The ROI analyses demonstrated that there wasenhanced activity inbrain regions linked to self-representation [the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC)] in self-associated shapes compared to friend-associated shapes when they appeared as distractors.There was also increased activity in the left intraparietal cortex sulcusin friend-associated shapes but not inself-associated shapes when they displayed as distractors.In contrast, the activity in the right intraparietalcortexwas enhanced when self-associated shapes were targets compared with when friend-associatedshapes ere targets..In conclusion, the results demonstrated a reliable rapid learning effect in self-compared with friendassociated shapes. Once participants learnt associations,, the newly learnt self information immediatelymodulatedvisual selction. The effect emerged at the early visual processing (N1) by modulating theinteraction between self-(vmPFC) and attentional (intraparietal cortex)-networks in the brain.