There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
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.