Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Self-relevant stimuli (e.g. own-name) have been known to enjoy cognitive priority, known as the self-prioritization effect (SPE). Attentional bias towards any event consists of two components: how quickly attention is captured and how long attention dwells on that event. Although faster attentional capture by self-relevant stimuli has been consistently established in the literature, it is unclear whether captured attention is held by self-relevant stimuli for longer, delaying attentional disengagement from self. Thus, the current study aims to provide a more comprehensive picture of the attentional mechanisms underlying SPE by employing the Posner cueing paradigm to investigate both facilitation (capture) and inhibition of return (disengagement), to test the commonly touted yet not investigated delayed disengagement hypothesis. The results found a self-specific facilitation at shorter CTOA, in line with literature, as well as a reduced IOR for self, indicating a slower attentional disengagement from self. The findings and implications are discussed in detail.