The Effect Of Self-reference On The Formation Process Of Perceptual Representations

The perception process of self-related information has become a hot problem in recent years,and self-reference processing refers to self-specifying information processing.Previous studies have shown that self-related information can obtain advantaged processing,and self-reference can exert on the early stage of visual perception.However,the mechanism of how self-reference affects the process of visual perception and show the advantaged results in the end of the processing has not been clearly explored.Visual working memory(VWM)is one of the fundamental cognitive systems of human.When individuals are in real environment,a continuous flow of concrete external visual information pouring into visual processing system,“data” related to the our goals could be selected by attention mechanism,and transformed into stable visual presentations which could be temporarily stored and manipulated in “RAM” of mind—working memory system.The formation of stable visual presentation contains two stages: encoding and consolidation.The present study focused on the influence of self-reference on the formation of VWM representation,and investigated the mechanism.In this study,we investigated the impact of self-reference on the formation process of visual perceptual representation in two studies with three experiments.In the first study,two behavioral experiments were conducted,in both participants were asked to associate different colors to different identities in a color-identity matching task and then complete a retroactive interference dual-task.The results of Experiment 1 infered that compared with friend and stranger-reference,forming visual perceptual representation of self-reference stimulus show different deployment of attentional resource during different stages;Experiment 2 divided this process into encoding and consolidation stage,by setting different levels of item time and different conditions of masking,results showed that self-reference stimulus could occupy more attention in encoding phase and enhance the modulation of attention resource in consolidation phase,allowing the successful formation of target representations.In general,the results of Study 1 show that self-reference can affect the encoding phase and consolidation phase of the formation process of visual perceptual representation,respectively.In Study 2 event-related potential experiment was used,participants were asked to complete the color-identity matching task and change-detection task of working memory in Experiment 3.Result found that,compared with friend and stranger-reference,self-reference stimulus could induce greater N1 amplitude when the memory items presented 50 ms without masking,and could induced greater P300 amplitude when the memory items presented 50 ms with masking.Results indicate that self-reference can affect early sensory encoding and enhance the modulation of attention resource in consolidation.And self-reference stimulus had a very different impact on the amplitude of contralateral delay activity(CDA)under mask condition and no-mask condition comparing with friend and stranger-reference.Results further shows that self-reference has different effect on consolidation phase.Based on the results of this study,we draw the conclusions: self-reference could exert on the encoding and consolidation stages through different mechanisms;the feature of self-reference stimulus could trigger attention blaster automatically in encoding phase;and self-reference could enhance the modulation of attention resource allowing successful formation of target representations in consolidation phase,even without complete encoding;and self-reference may be able to automatically strengthen the binding mechanism in consolidation phase.