The relations between perceptual and social saliency in visual selection

We take a particular interest in things that belong to us; we remember them better and we pay them more attention when they appear in the environment. How this 'self prioritisation' comes about remains poorly understood however.
The aim of this project is to use a new procedure we have developed in order to understand how 'self prioritisation' affects basic perceptual processes. In our new procedure we can 'tag' a geometric shape with self relevance and we can then study how basic perceptual processing for that shape changes when compared with other matched shapes. In the project we will conduct a series of experiments that examine whether 'self prioritisation' affects spatial and temporal attention to stimuli. The research will provide a first-ever analysis of the effects of a 'social' variable (the self) on difference stages of perception.