Wade Gregory L, Vickery Timothy J
University of Delaware, 108 Wolf Hall, Newark, DE, 19716, USA.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2017 Jul;79(5):1524-1534. doi: 10.3758/s13414-017-1307-8.
Merely associating one's self with a stimulus may be enough to enhance performance in a label-matching paradigm (Sui, He, & Humphreys, 2012), implying prioritized processing of self-relevant stimuli. For instance, labeling a square as SELF and a circle as OTHER yields speeded performance when verifying square-SELF compared with circle-OTHER label matches. The precise causes of such effects are unclear. We propose that prioritized processing of label-matches can occur for reasons other than self-relevance. Here, we employ the label-matching paradigm to show similar benefits for non-self-relevant labels (SNAKE, FROG, and GREG) over a frequently employed, non-self-relevant control label (OTHER). These benefits suggest the possibility that self-relevance effects in the label-matching paradigm may be confounded with other properties of labels that lead to relative performance benefits, such as concreteness. The size of self-relevance effects may be overestimated in prior work employing the label-matching paradigm, which calls for greater care in the choice of control labels to determine the true magnitude of self-relevance effects. Our results additionally indicate the possibility of a powerful effect of concreteness (and related properties) on associative memory performance.
仅仅将自己与一种刺激联系起来可能就足以提高在标签匹配范式中的表现（隋、何和汉弗莱斯，2012），这意味着对与自我相关的刺激进行了优先处理。例如，将一个正方形标记为“自我”，将一个圆形标记为“其他”，在验证正方形 - “自我”与圆形 - “其他”标签匹配时，会提高表现速度。这种效应的确切原因尚不清楚。我们提出，标签匹配的优先处理可能由于与自我相关性无关的原因而发生。在这里，我们采用标签匹配范式来表明，与一个经常使用的、与自我无关的控制标签（“其他”）相比，非自我相关标签（“蛇”、“青蛙”和“格雷格”）也有类似的优势。这些优势表明，在标签匹配范式中，自我相关效应可能与导致相对表现优势的标签的其他属性（如具体性）混淆。在先前采用标签匹配范式的研究中，自我相关效应的大小可能被高估了，这就要求在选择控制标签时更加谨慎，以确定自我相关效应的真正大小。我们的结果还表明，具体性（及相关属性）对联想记忆表现可能有强大影响。
