Do Self-Advantages in Memory vs. Attention Share Common Psychological Mechanisms?

by

Faculty Sponsor: Kyungmi Kim

Live Poster Session: https://wesleyan.zoom.us/j/8795481927

Andrea Chiappetti
Andrea Chiappetti

Andrea Chiappetti is a current junior (’24) who is double majoring in Neuroscience & Behavior and Hispanic Culture & Literature, with a minor in Chemistry. Andrea is from Scottsdale, Arizona and went to Pinnacle High School prior to attending Wesleyan. Her interests outside of being on Wesleyan Women’s Soccer include writing fiction, watching sports games, and visiting as many beaches and coffee shops as possible. After university, Andrea hopes to continue pursuing her interest in glioblastoma tumor research, and apply to medical school in hopes of becoming an orthopedic sports medicine surgeon. 

William Li
William Li

William Li is a junior (’24) who is double majoring in Psychology and Economics with a minor in College of East Asian Studies. William is from Liaoning, China. His interests include playing basketball,
watching movies and going to exhibitions. He’s still figuring out what he wants to do after university.

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Lilli Liu
Lilli Liu

Lilli Liu is a current junior (’24) who is double majoring in Neuroscience & Behavior and Psychology. Lilli is from Houston, Texas and went to Glenda Dawson High School prior to attending Wesleyan. Outside academics, she is the Co-Chair of Wesleyan’s Asian American Student Collective and sings chamber music in the acapella group, the Mixolydians. Other interests of hers include baking, painting, and finding the best Asian restaurants around Middletown. After graduating Wesleyan, Lilli hopes to attend medical school to become a Neurologist.

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Abstract: The incidental self-reference effect (iSRE) refers to a memory advantage for information co-presented with self-relevant information (e.g., one’s own name) in the absence of any task demand to evaluate the information’s self-relevance. The iSRE has been suggested to be underpinned by preferential attention to self-relevant vs. other-relevant information, but this proposal is yet to be empirically evaluated. In the present study, we examined if and how the iSRE is related to attentional self-advantages in three distinct attentional networks (i.e., alerting, orienting, executive control) by administering both an iSRE memory task and the Attentional Network Test (ANT). In the iSRE memory task, participants showed better memory for words presented with their own name vs. their friend’s name, exhibiting an iSRE. In the ANT, they were faster at correctly judging the direction of a target arrow when spatially cued by their own name vs. their friend’s name, showing a self-advantage in attentional orienting network. There was no significant self-advantage for alerting or executive control network. Importantly, there was a marginally significant positive correlation between the size of the iSRE and the size of the self-advantage in attentional orienting. Though preliminary, our findings suggest that memorial and attentional self-advantages may operate via common psychological mechanisms.

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