Self-Association and Attentional Processing Regarding Perceptually Salient Items

Abstract

Earlier work has demonstrated that attention is indirectly cognitively malleable by processes of self-association – processes by which agents explicitly associate an item with the self. We extend this work by considering the manipulation of attention to both salient and non-salient objects. We demonstrate that self-association impacts attentional processing not only of non-salient objects (i.e., shapes), but also regarding salient items known to command attention (i.e., images of food). This result indicates the flexibility and susceptibility of attentional processing to cognitive manipulation.