Pay Attention To The Role Of The Network In The Advantages Of Self-processing

Self-related information is most closely associated with individuals. Stimuli of self usually appeared in those researches about self-processing advantage in memory and perception. However, this advantage was not found when self-related information appeared outside of attention or when attention resources were depleted. Task-relevance is also an influencing factor of self-processing advantage. Attention control is often regulated by task requirements and affects following task performance. It implied that the features of attention processing might be the key of the presence or absence of self-advantage. According to the attention network approach, attention can be divided into three functionally and anatomically distinct networks: alerting, orienting, and executive control. The three networks have their own division so that can save cognitive resources to help individuals coping with the complicated changes in the external environment. In order to understand the function of attention in self-information processing as well as the effect of taskdirected features of attention on self-advantage, this study used the attention network test(ANT) to evaluate the processing efficiency of these three networks in response to self-related information.In experiment 1, the processing efficiency of attention networks between self-face and friend-face were measured. Results showed that participants had a stable advantage in processing self-face, and the efficiency of orienting on self-face was significantly larger than friend-face.In experiment 2, we measured the efficiency of attention networks on newly established self-referential shapes, friend-referential shapes and nonsocial-meaning shapes. The result was consistent with experiment 1 that self-referential shapes had advantages on the efficiency of orienting network. But no difference was found in the process of the other two shapes. It implied that the improvement of orienting network on self-information processing is not because of familiarity but the important meaning contained in self-information.In experiment 3a and experiment 3b, whether task relevance would affect self-advantage and the efficiency of three attention networks was tested. We found that the processing priority of orienting network depended on the task requirement. No matter self-referential shapes or self-face, their advantages on orienting network disappeared when they were task-irrelevant.The major findings of this study were summarized as the following three aspects: Firstly, the special meaning contained in self-related information is one of the reasons for self-advantage in perceptual processing. Secondly, in the three attention networks, orienting network showed the processing priority of self-information, and therefore played an important role in self-processing advantage. There was no special bias of alerting network or executive control network in self-information processing. Thirdly, the task-directed orienting network influenced the presence or absence of self-processing advantage.