Combining social cues in attention: Looking at gaze, head, and pointing cues.

Social cues bias covert spatial attention. In most previous work the impact of different social cues, such as the gaze, head, and pointing cue, has been investigated using separated cues or making one cue explicitly task relevant in response-interference tasks. In the present study we created a novel cartoon figure in which unpredictive gaze and head and pointing cues could be combined to study their impact on spatial attention. In Experiment 1, gaze and pointing cues were either presented alone or together. When both cues were present, they were always directed to the same location. In Experiment 2, gaze and pointing cues were either directed to the same location (aligned) or directed to different locations (conflicted). Experiment 3 was like Experiment 2, except that the pointing cue was tested alongside a head-direction cue. The results of Experiment 1 showed that the effect of the gaze cue was reliably smaller than the pointing cue, and an aligned gaze cue did not have an additive benefit for performance. In Experiments 2 and 3, performance was determined by the pointing cue, regardless of where they eyes were looking, or the head was directed. The present results demonstrated a strong dominance of the pointing cue over the other cues. The child-friendly stimuli present a versatile way to study the impact of the combination of social cues, which may further benefit developmental research in social attention, and research in populations whose members might have atypical social attention.

Does age-related hearing loss deteriorate attentional resources?

Recent work suggests that age-related hearing loss (HL) is a possible risk factor for cognitive decline in older adults. Resulting poor speech recognition negatively impacts cognitive, social and emotional functioning and may relate to dementia. However, little is known about the consequences of hearing loss on other non-linguistic domains of cognition. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of HL on covert orienting of attention, selective attention and executive control. We compared older adults with and without mild to moderate hearing loss (26-60 dB) performing (1) a spatial cueing task with uninformative central cues (social vs. nonsocial cues), (2) a flanker task and (3) a neuropsychological assessment of attention. The results showed that overall response times and flanker interference effects were comparable across groups. However, in spatial cueing of attention using social and nonsocial cues, hearing impaired individuals were characterized by reduced validity effects, though no additional group differences were found between social and nonsocial cues. Hearing impaired individuals also demonstrated diminished performance on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) and on tasks requiring divided attention and flexibility. This work indicates that while response speed and response inhibition appear to be preserved following mild-to-moderate acquired hearing loss, orienting of attention, divided attention and the ability to flexibly allocate attentional resources are more deteriorated in older adults with HL. This work suggests that hearing loss might exacerbate the detrimental influences of aging on visual attention.

Effects of Mindset and Dietary Restraint on Attention Bias for Food and Food Intake.

Evidence for attention bias (AB) for food in restrained eaters is inconsistent. A person's mindset related to food - that is, whether someone focuses on the hedonic or health aspects of food - might be an overlooked influence on AB for food, possibly explaining the inconsistency in the literature. Fluctuations between a hedonic versus a health mindset might be strongest in restrained eaters, who have a conflicted relationship with food. We investigated the effect of mindset and dietary restraint on AB for food and food intake. We hypothesized that AB for food, as reflected in eye-movement measures and manual response latencies, as well as food intake, would be larger in the hedonic than in the health mindset, most strongly in participants scoring high on dietary restraint. Moreover, we expected a positive correlation between AB for food and food intake, especially in the hedonic mindset. We used short video clips to induce either a health or hedonic mindset. Subsequently, participants (n = 122) performed a modified additional singleton task with pictures of high-caloric food vs neutral pictures as irrelevant distractors. Next, food intake was measured in a bogus taste test. We found no evidence for an AB towards food, nor any moderation by either mindset or dietary restraint. Food intake tended to be higher for participants scoring higher on dietary restraint, but effects were not moderated by mindset. Response-latency based AB for food tended to correlate positively with food intake in the hedonic mindset. Taken together, our hypotheses regarding AB for food were largely not confirmed. We provide suggestions on how to improve upon the specific implementations of our AB task and mindset manipulation, to strengthen future research in this field.

Food Captures Attention, but Not the Eyes: An Eye-Tracking Study on Mindset and BMI's Impact on Attentional Capture by High-Caloric Visual Food Stimuli.

Obesity is a worldwide pandemic and theories propose that attentional bias (AB) for food triggers craving and overeating, especially for people with obesity. However, empirical evidence is inconsistent, which may be due to methodological diversity and the double-sided nature of high-caloric palatable foods. That is, these foods simultaneously have a high hedonic and a low health value. So, depending on context and/or emotional state, people's mindset while viewing foods may alternate between hedonic (taste) and health (calories) values, possibly affecting AB for food in opposite directions. This study tests how mindset and BMI (Body Mass Index) influences AB and food intake. We expect greater AB for food and more food intake in the hedonic compared to the health mindset, especially for people with obesity. Mindsets were induced using short video-clips in two sessions in counterbalanced order. Participants (35 with a healthy-weight-category BMI, 31 with obesity) performed a modified Additional Singleton paradigm where they searched for a neutral target among neutral fillers. On 90% of the trials, either a food or a neutral distractor appeared. Response latencies to the target and eye-movements to the distractor were recorded. Dependent variables included: response latencies, and eye-movement variables on the distractor: fixations (%), 1st fixation duration, dwell-time. Food intake was assessed in a bogus taste test. No significant effects emerged from the eye-movements analysis, whereas the analysis of response latencies showed an AB for food, not significantly moderated by BMI or mindset. Food intake was affected by mindset partly as expected, as participants ate more in the hedonic than in the health mindset when the hedonic mindset was induced in the second session. One AB measure (fixations) correlated positively with food intake. Finally, food captured attention - but not the eyes - and mindset affects food intake partly as expected.

An attentional limbo: Saccades become momentarily non-selective in between saliency-driven and relevance-driven selection.

Human vision involves selectively directing the eyes to potential objects of interest. According to most prominent theories, selection is the quantal outcome of an ongoing competition between saliency-driven signals on the one hand, and relevance-driven signals on the other, with both types of signals continuously and concurrently projecting onto a common priority map. Here, we challenge this view. We asked participants to make a speeded eye movement towards a target orientation, which was presented together with a non-target of opposing tilt. In addition to the difference in relevance, the target and non-target also differed in saliency, with the target being either more or less salient than the non-target. We demonstrate that saliency- and relevance-driven eye movements have highly idiosyncratic temporal profiles, with saliency-driven eye movements occurring rapidly after display onset while relevance-driven eye movements occur only later. Remarkably, these types of eye movements can be fully separated in time: We find that around 250 ms after display onset, eye movements are no longer driven by saliency differences between potential targets, but also not yet driven by relevance information, resulting in a period of non-selectivity, which we refer to as the attentional limbo. Binomial modeling further confirmed that visual selection is not necessarily the outcome of a direct battle between saliency- and relevance-driven signals. Instead, selection reflects the dynamic changes in the underlying saliency- and relevance-driven processes themselves, and the time at which an action is initiated then determines which of the two will emerge as the driving force of behavior.

A failure to learn object shape geometry: Implications for convolutional neural networks as plausible models of biological vision.

Here we examine the plausibility of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as a theoretical framework for understanding biological vision in the context of image classification. Recent work on object recognition in human vision has shown that both global, and local, shape information is computed, and integrated, early during perceptual processing. Our goal was to compare the similarity in how object shape information is processed by CNNs and human observers. We tested the hypothesis that, unlike the human system, CNNs do not compute representations of global and local object geometry during image classification. To do so, we trained and tested six CNNs (AlexNet, VGG-11, VGG-16, ResNet-18, ResNet-50, GoogLeNet), and human observers, to discriminate geometrically possible and impossible objects. The ability to complete this task requires computation of a representational structure of shape that encodes both global and local object geometry because the detection of impossibility derives from an incongruity between well-formed local feature conjunctions and their integration into a geometrically well-formed 3D global shape. Unlike human observers, none of the tested CNNs could reliably discriminate between possible and impossible objects. Detailed analyses using gradient-weighted class activation mapping (GradCam) of CNN image feature processing showed that network classification performance was not constrained by object geometry. In contrast, if classification could be made based solely on local feature information in line drawings the CNNs were highly accurate. We argue that these findings reflect fundamental differences between CNNs and human vision in terms of underlying image processing structure. Notably, unlike human vision, CNNs do not compute representations of object geometry. The results challenge the plausibility of CNNs as a framework for understanding image classification in biological vision systems.

Strategic Distractor Suppression Improves Selective Control in Human Vision.

Our visual environment is complicated, and our cognitive capacity is limited. As a result, we must strategically ignore some stimuli to prioritize others. Common sense suggests that foreknowledge of distractor characteristics, like location or color, might help us ignore these objects. But empirical studies have provided mixed evidence, often showing that knowing about a distractor before it appears counterintuitively leads to its attentional selection. What has looked like strategic distractor suppression in the past is now commonly explained as a product of prior experience and implicit statistical learning, and the long-standing notion the distractor suppression is reflected in α band oscillatory brain activity has been challenged by results appearing to link α to target resolution. Can we strategically, proactively suppress distractors? And, if so, does this involve α? Here, we use the concurrent recording of human EEG and eye movements in optimized experimental designs to identify behavior and brain activity associated with proactive distractor suppression. Results from three experiments show that knowing about distractors before they appear causes a reduction in electrophysiological indices of covert attentional selection of these objects and a reduction in the overt deployment of the eyes to the location of the objects. This control is established before the distractor appears and is predicted by the power of cue-elicited α activity over the visual cortex. Foreknowledge of distractor characteristics therefore leads to improved selective control, and α oscillations in visual cortex reflect the implementation of this strategic, proactive mechanism.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT To behave adaptively and achieve goals we often need to ignore visual distraction. Is it easier to ignore distracting objects when we know more about them? We recorded eye movements and electrical brain activity to determine whether foreknowledge of distractor characteristics can be used to limit processing of these objects. Results show that knowing the location or color of a distractor stops us from attentionally selecting it. A neural signature of this inhibition emerges in oscillatory alpha band brain activity, and when this signal is strong, selective processing of the distractor decreases. Knowing about the characteristics of task-irrelevant distractors therefore increases our ability to focus on task-relevant information, in this way gating information processing in the brain.

Eye-movement patterns to social and non-social cues in early deaf adults.

Previous research on covert orienting to the periphery suggested that early profound deaf adults were less susceptible to uninformative gaze-cues, though were equally or more affected by non-social arrow-cues. The aim of this work was to investigate whether spontaneous eye movement behaviour helps explain the reduced impact of the social cue in deaf adults. We tracked the gaze of 25 early profound deaf and 25 age-matched hearing observers performing a peripheral discrimination task with uninformative central cues (gaze vs arrow), stimulus-onset asynchrony (250 vs 750 ms), and cue validity (valid vs invalid) as within-subject factors. In both groups, the cue effect on reaction time (RT) was comparable for the two cues, although deaf observers responded significantly slower than hearing controls. While deaf and hearing observers' eye movement pattern looked similar when the cue was presented in isolation, deaf participants made significantly more eye movements than hearing controls once the discrimination target appeared. Notably, further analysis of eye movements in the deaf group revealed that independent of the cue type, cue validity affected saccade landing position, while latency was not modulated by these factors. Saccade landing position was also strongly related to the magnitude of the validity effect on RT, such that the greater the difference in saccade landing position between invalid and valid trials, the greater the difference in manual RT between invalid and valid trials. This work suggests that the contribution of overt selection in central cueing of attention is more prominent in deaf adults and helps determine the manual performance, irrespective of the cue type.

Environmental Learning of Social Cues: Evidence From Enhanced Gaze Cueing in Deaf Children.

The susceptibility to gaze cueing in deaf children aged 7-14 years old (N = 16) was tested using a nonlinguistic task. Participants performed a peripheral shape-discrimination task, whereas uninformative central gaze cues validly or invalidly cued the location of the target. To assess the role of sign language experience and bilingualism in deaf participants, three groups of age-matched hearing children were recruited: bimodal bilinguals (vocal and sign-language, N = 19), unimodal bilinguals (two vocal languages, N = 17), and monolinguals (N = 14). Although all groups showed a gaze-cueing effect and were faster to respond to validly than invalidly cued targets, this effect was twice as large in deaf participants. This result shows that atypical sensory experience can tune the saliency of a fundamental social cue.

The role of eye movements in manual responses to social and nonsocial cues.

Gaze and arrow cues cause covert attention shifts even when they are uninformative. Nonetheless, it is unclear to what extent oculomotor behavior influences manual responses to social and nonsocial stimuli. In two experiments, we tracked the gaze of participants during the cueing task with nonpredictive gaze and arrow cues. In Experiment 1, the discrimination task was easy and eye movements were not necessary, whereas in Experiment 2 they were instrumental in identifying the target. Validity effects on manual response time (RT) were similar for the two cues in Experiment 1 and in Experiment 2, though in the presence of eye movements observers were overall slower to respond to the arrow cue compared with the gaze cue. Cue direction had an effect on saccadic performance before the discrimination was presented and throughout the duration of the trial. Furthermore, we found evidence of a distinct impact of the type of cue on diverse oculomotor components. While saccade latencies were affected by the type of cue, both before and after the target onset, saccade landing positions were not. Critically, the manual validity effect was predicted by the landing position of the initial eye movement. This work suggests that the relationship between eye movements and attention is not straightforward. In the presence of overt selection, saccade latency related to the overall speed of manual response, while eye movements landing position was closely related to manual performance in response to different cues.

Predictions as a window into learning: Anticipatory fixation offsets carry more information about environmental statistics than reactive stimulus-responses.

A core question underlying neurobiological and computational models of behavior is how individuals learn environmental statistics and use them to make predictions. Most investigations of this issue have relied on reactive paradigms, in which inferences about predictive processes are derived by modeling responses to stimuli that vary in likelihood. Here we deployed a novel anticipatory oculomotor metric to determine how input statistics impact anticipatory behavior that is decoupled from target-driven-response. We implemented transition constraints between target locations, so that the probability of a target being presented on the same side as the previous trial was 70% in one condition (pret70) and 30% in the other (pret30). Rather than focus on responses to targets, we studied subtle endogenous anticipatory fixation offsets (AFOs) measured while participants fixated the screen center, awaiting a target. These AFOs were small (<0.4° from center on average), but strongly tracked global-level statistics. Speaking to learning dynamics, trial-by-trial fluctuations in AFO were well-described by a learning model, which identified a lower learning rate in pret70 than pret30, corroborating prior suggestions that pret70 is subjectively treated as more regular. Most importantly, direct comparisons with saccade latencies revealed that AFOs: (a) reflected similar temporal integration windows, (b) carried more information about the statistical context than did saccade latencies, and (c) accounted for most of the information that saccade latencies also contained about inputs statistics. Our work demonstrates how strictly predictive processes reflect learning dynamics, and presents a new direction for studying learning and prediction.

No evidence of task co-representation in a joint Stroop task.

People working together on a task must often represent the goals and salient items of their partner. The aim of the present study was to study the influence of joint task representations in an interference task in which the congruency relies on semantic identity. If task representations are shared between partners in a joint Stroop task (co-representation account), we hypothesized that items in the response set of one partner might influence performance of the other. In Experiment 1, pairs of participants sat side by side. Each participant was instructed to press one of two buttons to indicate which of two colors assigned to them was present, ignoring the text and responding only to the pixel color. There were three types of incongruent distractor words: names of colors from their own response set, names of colors from the other partner's response set, and neutral words for colors not used as font colors. The results of Experiment 1 showed that when people were doing this task together, distractor words from the partner's response set interfered more than neutral words and just as much as the words from their own response color set. However, in three follow-up experiments (Experiments 2a, 2b, and 2c), we found an elevated interference for the other response-set words even though no co-actor was present. The overall pattern of results across our study suggests that an alternative response set, regardless of whether it belonged to a co-actor or to a non-social no-go condition, evoked equal amounts of interference comparable to those of the own response set. Our findings are in line with a theory of common coding, in which all events-irrespective of their social nature-are represented and can influence behavior.

Effect of dietary restraint and mood state on attentional processing of food cues.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Research linking dietary restraint to attentional bias toward food cues has been equivocal, suggesting that dietary restraint may only influence attentional processing of food in certain contexts. The present study examined whether negative mood strengthens the association between dietary restraint and attention bias for food. METHODS: Healthy female participants were randomized to either a neutral (n = 47) or negative mood (n = 49) induction. Participants then completed a visual search task featuring targets displayed adjacent to pictures of palatable food, musical instruments, or non-instrument filler objects. Attention bias for food was operationalized as shorter response latency when the target appeared adjacent to palatable food as compared to musical instruments. Attention bias was examined in a 2 (mood condition) × 2 (picture: food vs. instrument) × 2 (target location: match vs. mismatch) repeated measures ANCOVA, with dietary restraint as a continuous covariate and response latency as the dependent variable. RESULTS: Though there was no evidence of an interaction between mood condition and dietary restraint, mood had an influence on attention allocation. Contrary to study hypotheses, individuals in the neutral mood condition, but not those in the negative mood condition, responded in a manner indicative of bias toward food. LIMITATIONS: Additional research is necessary to validate the experimental task used in the present study to assess food-specific attentional bias. CONCLUSIONS: Neutral mood may be associated with enhanced processing of palatable food cues. Critically, results do not support the hypothesized link between negative mood and attention bias for food.

Spontaneous pre-stimulus oscillatory activity shapes the way we look: A concurrent imaging and eye-movement study.

Previous behavioural studies have accrued evidence that response time plays a critical role in determining whether selection is influenced by stimulus saliency or target template. In the present work, we investigated to what extent the variations in timing and consequent oculomotor controls are influenced by spontaneous variations in pre-stimulus alpha oscillations. We recorded simultaneously brain activity using magnetoencephalography (MEG) and eye movements while participants performed a visual search task. Our results show that slower saccadic reaction times were predicted by an overall stronger alpha power in the 500 ms time window preceding the stimulus onset, while weaker alpha power was a signature of faster responses. When looking separately at performance for fast and slow responses, we found evidence for two specific sources of alpha activity predicting correct versus incorrect responses. When saccades were quickly elicited, errors were predicted by stronger alpha activity in posterior areas, comprising the angular gyrus in the temporal-parietal junction (TPJ) and possibly the lateral intraparietal area (LIP). Instead, when participants were slower in responding, an increase of alpha power in frontal eye fields (FEF), supplementary eye fields (SEF) and dorsolateral pre-frontal cortex (DLPFC) predicted erroneous saccades. In other words, oculomotor accuracy in fast responses was predicted by alpha power differences in more posterior areas, while the accuracy in slow responses was predicted by alpha power differences in frontal areas, in line with the idea that these areas may be differentially related to stimulus-driven and goal-driven control of selection.

Conditional control in visual selection.

Attention and eye movements provide a window into the selective processing of visual information. Evidence suggests that selection is influenced by various factors and is not always under the strategic control of the observer. The aims of this tutorial review are to give a brief introduction to eye movements and attention and to outline the conditions that help determine control. Evidence suggests that the ability to establish control depends on the complexity of the display as well as the point in time at which selection occurs. Stimulus-driven selection is more probable in simple displays than in complex natural scenes, but it critically depends on the timing of the response: Salience determines selection only when responses are triggered quickly following display presentation, and plays no role in longer-latency responses. The time course of selection is also important for the relationship between attention and eye movements. Specifically, attention and eye movements appear to act independently when oculomotor selection is quick, whereas attentional processes are able to influence oculomotor control when saccades are triggered only later in time. This relationship may also be modulated by whether the eye movement is controlled in a voluntary or an involuntary manner. To conclude, we present evidence that shows that visual control is limited in flexibility and that the mechanisms of selection are constrained by context and time. The outcome of visual selection changes with the situational context, and knowing the constraints of control is necessary to understanding when and how visual selection is truly controlled by the observer.

The impact of salience and visual working memory on the monitoring and control of saccadic behavior: An eye-tracking and EEG study.

In a concurrent eye-tracking and EEG study, we investigated the impact of salience on the monitoring and control of eye movement behavior and the role of visual working memory (VWM) capacity in mediating this effect. Participants made eye movements to a unique line-segment target embedded in a search display also containing a unique distractor. Target and distractor salience was manipulated by varying degree of orientation offset from a homogenous background. VWM capacity was measured using a change-detection task. Results showed greater likelihood of incorrect saccades when the distractor was relatively more salient than when the target was salient. Misdirected saccades to salient distractors were strongly represented in the error-monitoring system by rapid and robust error-related negativity (ERN), which predicted a significant adjustment of oculomotor behavior. Misdirected saccades to less-salient distractors, while arguably representing larger errors, were not as well detected or utilized by the error/performance-monitoring system. This system was instead better engaged in tasks requiring greater cognitive control and by individuals with higher VWM capacity. Our findings show that relative salience of task-relevant and task-irrelevant stimuli can define situations where an increase in cognitive control is necessary, with individual differences in VWM capacity explaining significant variance in the degree of monitoring and control of goal-directed eye movement behavior. The present study supports a conflict-monitoring interpretation of the ERN, whereby the level of competition between different responses, and the stimuli that define these responses, was more important in the generation of an enhanced ERN than the error commission itself.

A temporal dependency account of attentional inhibition in oculomotor control.

We used concurrent electroencephalogram (EEG) and eye tracking to investigate the role of covert attentional mechanisms in the control of oculomotor behavior. Human participants made speeded saccades to targets that were presented alongside salient distractors. By subsequently sorting trials based on whether the distractor was strongly represented or suppressed by the visual system - as evident in the accuracy (Exp. 1) or quality of the saccade (Exp. 2) - we could characterize and contrast pre-saccadic neural activity as a function of whether oculomotor control was established. Results show that saccadic behavior is strongly linked to the operation of attentional mechanisms in visual cortex. In Experiment 1, accurate saccades were preceded by attentional selection of the target - indexed by a target-elicited N2pc component - and by attentional suppression of the distractor - indexed by early and late distractor-elicited distractor positivity (Pd) components. In Experiment 2, the strength of distractor suppression predicted the degree to which the path of slower saccades would deviate away from the distractor en route to the target. However, results also demonstrated clear dissociations of covert and overt selective control, with saccadic latency in particular showing no relationship to the latency of covert selective mechanisms. Eye movements could thus be initiated prior to the onset of attentional ERP components, resulting in stimulus-driven behaviour. Taken together, the results indicate that attentional mechanisms play a role in determining saccadic behavior, but that saccade timing is not contingent on the deployment of attention. This creates a temporal dependency, whereby attention fosters oculomotor control only when attentional mechanisms are given sufficient opportunity to impact stimuli representations before an eye movement is executed.

The oculomotor salience of flicker, apparent motion and continuous motion in saccade trajectories.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the impact of dynamic distractors on the time-course of oculomotor selection using saccade trajectory deviations. Participants were instructed to make a speeded eye movement (pro-saccade) to a target presented above or below the fixation point while an irrelevant distractor was presented. Four types of distractors were varied within participants: (1) static, (2) flicker, (3) rotating apparent motion and (4) continuous motion. The eccentricity of the distractor was varied between participants. The results showed that saccadic trajectories curved towards distractors presented near the vertical midline; no reliable deviation was found for distractors presented further away from the vertical midline. Differences between the flickering and rotating distractor were found when distractor eccentricity was small and these specific effects developed over time such that there was a clear differentiation between saccadic deviation based on apparent motion for long-latency saccades, but not short-latency saccades. The present results suggest that the influence on performance of apparent motion stimuli is relatively delayed and acts in a more sustained manner compared to the influence of salient static, flickering and continuous moving stimuli.

Spatial and non-spatial multisensory cueing in unilateral cochlear implant users.

In the present study we examined the integrity of spatial and non-spatial multisensory cueing (MSC) mechanisms in unilateral CI users. We tested 17 unilateral CI users and 17 age-matched normal hearing (NH) controls in an elevation-discrimination task for visual targets delivered at peripheral locations. Visual targets were presented alone (visual-only condition) or together with abrupt sounds that matched or did not match the location of the visual targets (audio-visual conditions). All participants were also tested in simple pointing to free-field sounds task, to obtain a basic measure of their spatial hearing ability in the naturalistic environment in which the experiment was conducted. Hearing controls were tested both in binaural and monaural conditions. NH controls showed spatial MSC benefits (i.e., faster discrimination for visual targets that matched sound cues) both in the binaural and in the monaural hearing conditions. In addition, they showed non-spatial MSC benefits (i.e., faster discrimination responses in audio-visual conditions compared to visual-only conditions, regardless of sound cue location) in the monaural condition. Monaural CI users showed no spatial MSC benefits, but retained non-spatial MSC benefits comparable to that observed in NH controls tested monaurally. The absence of spatial MSC in CI users likely reflects the poor spatial hearing ability measured in these participants. These findings reveal the importance of studying the impact of CI re-afferentation beyond auditory processing alone, addressing in particular the fundamental mechanisms that serves orienting of multisensory attention in the environment.

Testing the idea of privileged awareness of self-relevant information.

Self-relevant information is prioritized in processing. Some have suggested the mechanism driving this advantage is akin to the automatic prioritization of physically salient stimuli in information processing (Humphreys & Sui, 2015). Here we investigate whether self-relevant information is prioritized for awareness under continuous flash suppression (CFS), as has been found for physical salience. Gabor patches with different orientations were first associated with the labels You or Other. Participants were more accurate in matching the self-relevant association, replicating previous findings of self-prioritization. However, breakthrough into awareness from CFS did not differ between self- and other-associated Gabors. These findings demonstrate that self-relevant information has no privileged access to awareness. Rather than modulating the initial visual processes that precede and lead to awareness, the advantage of self-relevant information may better be characterized as prioritization at later processing stages.