Noel Jean-Paul, Blanke Olaf, Serino Andrea, Salomon Roy
Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Life Science, Brain Mind Institute, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de LausanneLausanne, Switzerland; Center for Neuroprosthetics, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de LausanneLausanne, Switzerland; Vanderbilt Brain Institute, Vanderbilt University, NashvilleTN, USA.
Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Life Science, Brain Mind Institute, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de LausanneLausanne, Switzerland; Center for Neuroprosthetics, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de LausanneLausanne, Switzerland; Department of Neurology, University HospitalGeneva, Switzerland.
Front Psychol. 2017 Jan 31;8:72. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00072. eCollection 2017.
The construct of the "self" is conceived as being fundamental in promoting survival. As such, extensive studies have documented preferential processing of self-relevant stimuli. For example, attributes that relate to the self are better encoded and retrieved, and are more readily consciously perceived. The preferential processing of self-relevant information, however, appears to be especially true for physical (e.g., faces), as opposed to psychological (e.g., traits), conceptions of the self. Here, we test whether semantic attributes that participants judge as self-relevant are further processed unconsciously than attributes that were not judged as self-relevant. In Experiment 1, a continuous flash suppression paradigm was employed with "self" and "non-self" attribute words being presented subliminally, and we asked participants to categorize unseen words as either self-related or not. In a second experiment, we attempted to boost putative preferential self-processing by relation to its physical conception, that is, one's own body. To this aim, we repeated Experiment 1 while administrating acoustic stimuli either close or far from the body, i.e., within or outside peripersonal space. Results of both Experiment 1 and 2 demonstrate no difference in breaking suppression for self and non-self words. Additionally, we found that while participants were able to process the physical location of the unseen words (above or below fixation) they were not able to categorize these as self-relevant or not. Finally, results showed that sounds presented in the extra-personal space elicited a more stringent response criterion for "self" in the process of categorizing unseen visual stimuli. This shift in criterion as a consequence of sound location was restricted to the self, as no such effect was observed in the categorization of attributes occurring above or below fixation. Overall, our findings seem to indicate that subliminally presented stimuli are not semantically processed, at least inasmuch as to be categorized as self-relevant or not. However, we do demonstrate that the distance at which acoustic stimuli are presented may alter the balance between self- and non-self biases.
“自我”的概念被认为是促进生存的基础。因此，大量研究记录了对与自我相关刺激的优先处理。例如，与自我相关的属性被更好地编码和检索，并且更容易被有意识地感知。然而，与自我相关信息的优先处理似乎在身体（如面孔）方面尤其如此，而不是心理（如特质）方面的自我概念。在此，我们测试参与者判断为与自我相关的语义属性是否比未被判断为与自我相关的属性在无意识层面得到进一步处理。在实验1中，采用连续闪光抑制范式，“自我”和“非自我”属性词被阈下呈现，我们要求参与者将未看到的词分类为与自我相关或不相关。在第二个实验中，我们试图通过与身体概念（即自己的身体）的关联来增强假定的优先自我处理。为此，我们重复实验1，同时在身体附近或远处（即个人空间内或外）施加听觉刺激。实验1和2的结果都表明，自我词和非自我词在打破抑制方面没有差异。此外，我们发现，虽然参与者能够处理未看到词的物理位置（注视点上方或下方），但他们无法将这些词分类为与自我相关或不相关。最后，结果表明，在对未看到的视觉刺激进行分类的过程中，在个人空间外呈现的声音引发了对“自我”更严格的反应标准。作为声音位置结果的这种标准变化仅限于自我，因为在对注视点上方或下方出现的属性进行分类时未观察到这种效应。总体而言，我们的研究结果似乎表明，阈下呈现的刺激至少在被分类为与自我相关或不相关的程度上没有进行语义处理。然而，我们确实证明了听觉刺激呈现的距离可能会改变自我和非自我偏差之间的平衡。
