Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Research has demonstrated an advantage for the processing of self-associated stimuli for various mental functions (Sui & Humphreys, 2017). However, relatively little is known about whether prioritization exists for internal representations (Yin et al., 2019). In the current study, we first asked participants to associate social – labels ('self', ‘friend’, ‘stranger’) with arbitrary geometrical shapes (triangle, quadrilateral, and pentagon) (Sui et al., 2012) and then tested them for the maintenance of one or more features (shape, location, or a combination) of the target stimuli during a delayed match – to – sample task. In line with our expectations, our participants indeed showed a distinct advantage for self-associated stimuli for maintaining single features (identity, location) and a combination (shape & location). Our findings align with the proposal that self-reference may aid in binding information in working memory (Sui & Humphreys, 2015).