Self-related objects increase alertness and orient attention through top-down saliency

Attention is influenced by information about relationships between ourselves and the objects around us. Self-related objects can both facilitate and disrupt task performance, creating a challenge for identifying the precise nature of the influence of self-relatedness on attention. We measured different components of attention in the presence of self-related objects using a revised attention network task (ANT). In a self-association task, participants first learned colour-person associations (e.g., red-friend, yellow-me) and then carried out a colour-person matching task. This was followed by the ANT, in which these coloured boxes associated with self or friend were displayed as endogenous cues; participants had to judge the direction of an arrow flanked by congruent (low-conflict) or incongruent (high-conflict) distractors presented within one coloured box. The results showed faster and more accurate responses to targets appearing within the self-colour than friend-colour cues in the association task. In the ANT, the analysis of alertness revealed that self-related cues facilitated task performance compared to friend-related cues. The analysis of orienting demonstrated that relative to friend cues, self cues hampered task performance in the invalid trials. Critically, these effects exclusively occurred in high conflict situations. These results indicated that self-related objects are powerful cues that enhance attention intensity, which either facilitates task performance when the upcoming target falls within their location, or disrupt performance when the target falls outside their location. The data suggest that attentional functions can be tuned by self-saliency in high-demand contexts.