The Advantage Of Self-Related Information Processing In Attentional Blink Paradigm

Self-related information,such as one's own name and face,which owns a processing advantage in automatically capturing attention as compared to other information,is captured earlier and located more quickly in the unintentional,unconscious and uncontrolled situations.This kind of processing advantage has been widely testified in the field of attentional blink.The phenomenon of attention blink could reflect the processing features of selective attention in time dimension.The paradigm of rapid serial visual presentation(RSVP)was often adopted to explore the attention blink,which requires participants reporting the content of two special target stimulus(the first target stimulus is often referred to T1,as the second goal stimulation referred to T2),after the temporal stimulation stream occurred.If the time interval is set between two goals from 200 to 500 ms,the accuracy of identify T2 by the participants would significantly decrease.In particular,it would achieve the lowest accuracy when the time interval is between stimuli T1 and T2 was 300 ms.It has been confirmed that self-name or self-face has a prominent processing advantage in the previous RSVP paradigm research,but the familiarity factor,like the familiarity of experimental materials and tasks,which may interfere with the self-related information processing advantages,has not been involved.Therefore,to inspect whether the self has a key role in cognitive processing or not,the self-relevance and familiarity should be isolated.Previous research has found that not only self-related directly information such as name and face but indirect and new self-connectional information could influence cognitive processing in a special way.For example,the self-related screen name,even chosen and changed casually,has special meanings for users and would become personal logo to represent self in the virtual world,which is same as the real world,showing preponderantly cognitive processing.Other studies have found that the self-relevant information in temporary connection also showed a special processing style without familiarity factor.By means of exploring the familiarity of self-relevant information in the processing of attentional blink,not only the processing advantages of self-related information vs.normal information could be verified,but the self-relevant information,not the familiarity,should be the main reason of self-information processing advantage,which could be clarified to a great extent.Furthermore,through the verification of obvious advantage of self-network name in cognitive processing,the particular network self-information could be served as experimental materials to screen out network addicts.Above all,this study mainly investigated the influence of familiarity factor on self-relevant information processing advantages in attentional blink,and whether the attentional resources should be captured effectively by self-relevant information in the situation of familiarity controlled.The study included two experiments.In Experiment one,the materials of graphical information which were temporarily self-connected were used.We expect to investigate it has consistent characteristics with real self-information like ones' own name or face in the Attention Blink,that is,when the attentional resources is limited or largely consumed,whether temporary self-relevant information could capture attention rapidly.The experimental was designed as follows: the participants were asked to form associations between labels referring to sort of person and neutral geometric shapes.Such as to associate a triangle with the label “friend,” a circle with the label “stranger” and a square with the label “you”.After understanding the instructions,participants were asked to finish the shape-label pairs task and the RSVP double targets task,in which the shape matched the personal label as the T2 stimuli.According to the previous studies,the different perceptual load conditions of T1 and the time interval between stimuli T1 and T2 were set up to verify whether they should effect on attentional blink or not.The results showed that the responding accuracy to T1 was significantly different in the heavy and light cognitive load conditions,which suggested that the perceptual load was effectively moderated by the T1 task.The main effect of different delay time between T1 and T2 was significant.The T2 responding accuracy in lag6 was significantly higher than that in lag2,which meant attentional blink phenomenon occurred.The main effect of T2 reference types was also significant.The difference between self-graphical and stranger-graphical was significant by the simply effect analysis,that is,the T2 mean accuracy of self-graphical was significantly higher than that of stranger-graphical,showing an antagonistic effect of the attention blink.The interaction effect among three factors was not significant.The RSVP paradigm was also used in Experiment two,by setting different T2 reference category(ones' own name,screen name,celebrity name)to further investigate whether the internet information related to the self has the same cognitive processing advantages with the ones' own name,and whether the familiarity factor could effect on the cognitive processing by setting the celebrity name as a comparison condition.The results showed that the reaction accuracy on own real name and screen name conditions were higher than that of celebrity name,which indicated that one's own screen name,even had relatively weaker familiarity,also had cognitive processing advantages like self-name or face.It confirmed that the processing advantage of self-related information on the attention blink is not merely caused by the familiarity.We also found that the attentional blink could be influenced by the perceptual load levels of T1 and the time interval between T1 and T2.At the same time,we found that the attentional blink could be influenced by the perceptual load levels of T1 and the time interval between T1 and T2.The conclusions are as following based on above two experiments:1.The main factor influencing self-information processing uniqueness is not the familiarity,which is not enough to explain self-information processing advantage completely,but the self-related factors play a key role.2.Self-related information could capture attention quickly and compete for resources effectively,even the attention resources are limited or depleted largely,it manifested as the reduction or even elimination of the attentional blink effect in the double-aimed RSVP task.3.The attentional blink effect could be significantly influenced by the perceptual load and the time interval between T1 and T2 stimuli.