PURPOSE: Previous research on attentional priority of self-associated stimuli mostly focused on the advantage in attentional attraction. The characteristics of self-associated stimuli in attentional inhibition remained unclear. The purpose of this research was to investigate whether self-associated information can facilitate inhibition compared with other information in human visual search.
METHODS: Firstly participants completed an associative-learning task to associate color with label (e.g., green-self, blue-stranger). After that, they would finish a WM-guided visual search task. In this task, they were presented with several items to identify an unique target among the items. Participants were noted a specific color (e.g., red) in advance that need to be recalled and the items with the informed color could be excluded as distracters in the search display. This resulted in three conditions that the informed distracter color was either self-associated, stranger-associated, or neutral (no established association).
RESULTS: The response times of the search task were significantly shorter when the informed distracter color was self-associated (i.e., green) compared with when the informed distracter color was stranger-associated (i.e., blue) or neutral (i.e., red). There was no significant difference in search time between stranger-associated color and neural color condition. The results suggested that when the distracters link to self, participants could inhibit the distracters rapidly and search faster.
CONCLUSIONS: The present study provided an evidence that the active inhibition of a self-associated stimulus improves visual search performance. This study also furthered our understanding about attentional priority of self-associated stimuli and extended the self attention network (SAN) model.
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