We present novel evidence showing that new self-relevant visual associations can affect performance in simple shape recognition tasks. Participants associated labels for themselves, other people, or neutral terms with geometric shapes and then immediately judged whether subsequent label-shape pairings were matched. Across 4 experiments there was a reliable self-prioritization benefit on response times and perceptual sensitivity that remained across different presentation contexts (with self, best friend, and unfamiliar others in Experiment 1; with self, best friend, and neutral terms, and with self, mother, and neutral terms in Experiments 2A and 2B, respectively. Control studies in Experiment 3 indicated that the results did not reflect the length, concreteness, or familiarity of the words. The self-prioritization effect on shape matching also increased when stimuli were degraded (self shapes showing weaker effects of degradation) in Experiment 4A, consistent with self-information modulating perceptual processing. A similar effect was found when people associated different reward values to the shape in Experiment 4B. The results indicate that associating a stimulus to the self modulates its subsequent perceptual processing, and this may operate by self-associated shapes automatically evoking the reward system.

Although there is strong evidence that human decision-making is frequently self-biased, it remains unclear whether self-biases mediate attention. Here we review evidence on the relations between self-bias effects in decision-making and attention. We ask: Does self-related information capture attention? Do self-biases modulate pre-attentive processes or do they depend on attentional resources being available? We review work on (1) own-name effects, (2) own-face effects, and (3) self-biases in associative matching. We argue that self-related information does have a differential impact on the allocation of attention and that it can alter the saliency of a stimulus in a manner that mimics the effects of perceptual-saliency. However, there is also evidence that self-biases depend on the availability of attentional resources and attentional expectancies for upcoming stimuli. We propose a new processing framework, the Self-Attention Network (SAN), in which neural circuits responding to self-related stimuli interact with circuits supporting attentional control, to determine our emergent behavior. We also discuss how these-bias effects may extend beyond the self to be modulated by the broader social context—for example, by cultural experience, by an in-group as opposed to an out-group stimulus, and by whether we are engaged in joint actions. Self-biases on attention are modulated by social context.

Prior social psychological studies show that newly assigned personal significance can modulate high-level cognitive processes, e.g., memory and social evaluation, with self- and other-related information processed in dissociated prefrontal structure: ventral vs. dorsal, respectively. Here, we demonstrate the impact of personal significance on perception and show the neural network that supports this effect. We used an associative learning procedure in which we “tag” a neutral shape with a self-relevant label. Participants were instructed to associate three neutral shapes with labels for themselves, their best friend, or an unfamiliar other. Functional magnetic resonance imaging data were acquired while participants judged whether the shape-label pairs were maintained or swapped. Behaviorally, participants rapidly tagged a neutral stimulus with self-relevance, showing a robust advantage for self-tagged stimuli. Self-tagging responses were associated with enhanced activity in brain regions linked to self-representation [the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC)] and to sensory-driven regions associated with social attention [the left posterior superior temporal sulcus (LpSTS)]. In contrast, associations formed with other people recruited a dorsal frontoparietal control network, with the two networks being inversely correlated. Responses in the vmPFC and LpSTS predicted behavioral self-bias effects. Effective connectivity analyses showed that the vmPFC and the LpSTS were functionally coupled, with the strength of coupling associated with behavioral self-biases. The data show that assignment of personal social significance affects perceptual matching by coupling internal self-representations to brain regions modulating attentional responses to external stimuli.