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Automatic Prioritization of Self-Referential Stimuli in Working Memory.

Publication ,  Journal Article
Yin, S; Sui, J; Chiu, Y-C; Chen, A; Egner, T
Published in: Psychological science
March 2019

People preferentially attend to external stimuli that are related to themselves compared with others. Whether a similar self-reference bias applies to internal representations, such as those maintained in working memory (WM), is presently unknown. We tested this possibility in four experiments, in which participants were first trained to associate social labels (self, friend, stranger) with arbitrary colors and then performed a delayed match-to-sample spatial WM task on color locations. Participants consistently responded fastest to WM probes at locations of self-associated colors (Experiments 1-4). This self-bias was driven not by differential exogenous attention during encoding or retrieval (Experiments 1 and 2) but by internal attentional prioritization of self-related representations during WM maintenance (Experiment 3). Moreover, self-prioritization in WM was nonstrategic, as this bias persisted even under conditions in which it hurt WM performance. These findings document an automatic prioritization of self-referential items in WM, which may form the basis of some egocentric biases in decision making.

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Published In

Psychological science

DOI

EISSN

1467-9280

ISSN

0956-7976

Publication Date

March 2019

Volume

30

Issue

3

Start / End Page

415 / 423

Related Subject Headings

  • Young Adult
  • Students
  • Spatial Memory
  • Memory, Short-Term
  • Male
  • Humans
  • Female
  • Experimental Psychology
  • Ego
  • Color Perception
 

Citation

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Yin, S., Sui, J., Chiu, Y.-C., Chen, A., & Egner, T. (2019). Automatic Prioritization of Self-Referential Stimuli in Working Memory. Psychological Science, 30(3), 415–423. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618818483
Yin, Shouhang, Jie Sui, Yu-Chin Chiu, Antao Chen, and Tobias Egner. “Automatic Prioritization of Self-Referential Stimuli in Working Memory.Psychological Science 30, no. 3 (March 2019): 415–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618818483.
Yin S, Sui J, Chiu Y-C, Chen A, Egner T. Automatic Prioritization of Self-Referential Stimuli in Working Memory. Psychological science. 2019 Mar;30(3):415–23.
Yin, Shouhang, et al. “Automatic Prioritization of Self-Referential Stimuli in Working Memory.Psychological Science, vol. 30, no. 3, Mar. 2019, pp. 415–23. Epmc, doi:10.1177/0956797618818483.
Yin S, Sui J, Chiu Y-C, Chen A, Egner T. Automatic Prioritization of Self-Referential Stimuli in Working Memory. Psychological science. 2019 Mar;30(3):415–423.
Journal cover image

Published In

Psychological science

DOI

EISSN

1467-9280

ISSN

0956-7976

Publication Date

March 2019

Volume

30

Issue

3

Start / End Page

415 / 423

Related Subject Headings

  • Young Adult
  • Students
  • Spatial Memory
  • Memory, Short-Term
  • Male
  • Humans
  • Female
  • Experimental Psychology
  • Ego
  • Color Perception