ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2013
Coupling social attention to the self forms a network for personal significance.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 92 papers.
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Who cites it
92 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Visual and Interoceptive EEG Signatures Reveal the Interaction Between Facial and Creator Identities in Self-Processing.Brain sciences · 2026Article
- Self-Relevance Attenuates Emotion-Induced Blindness Across Individual, Relational, and Collective Levels.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- It's Probably Mine: Self-Prioritization Can Be a Decisional Strategy.Cognitive science · 2026Article
- Reward value shapes the time course of self-bias.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- We are what we eat: Cross-cultural self-prioritization effects for food stimuli.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2026Article
- Neural Compensation in the Medial Prefrontal Cortex Preserves Self-Prioritization in Aging: A Computational Approach.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Neural correlates of affective self-positivity bias in first and second languages.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Brief mindfulness practice influences the self-reference effect by caring for others.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The self-relevant spotlight metaphor: Self-relevant targets diminish distractor-response-binding effects.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Brain asymmetry and its association with inattention and heritability during neurodevelopment.Translational psychiatry · 2025Article
- Cognitive and neural underpinnings of friend-prioritization in a perceptual matching task.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Subregions in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex integrate threat and protective information to meta-represent safety.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- The impact of childhood psychological maltreatment on self-referential and mother-referential processing: evidence from perception and memory.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
- Causal Roles of Ventral and Dorsal Neural Systems for Automatic and Control Self-Reference Processing: A Function Lesion Mapping Study.Journal of clinical medicine · 2024Article
32 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Prior social psychological studies show that newly assigned personal significance can modulate high-level cognitive processes, e.g., memory and social evaluation, with self- and other-related information processed in dissociated prefrontal structure: ventral vs. dorsal, respectively. Here, we demonstrate the impact of personal significance on perception and show the neural network that supports this effect. We used an associative learning procedure in which we "tag" a neutral shape with a self-relevant label. Participants were instructed to associate three neutral shapes with labels for themselves, their best friend, or an unfamiliar other. Functional magnetic resonance imaging data were acquired while participants judged whether the shape-label pairs were maintained or swapped. Behaviorally, participants rapidly tagged a neutral stimulus with self-relevance, showing a robust advantage for self-tagged stimuli. Self-tagging responses were associated with enhanced activity in brain regions linked to self-representation [the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC)] and to sensory-driven regions associated with social attention [the left posterior superior temporal sulcus (LpSTS)]. In contrast, associations formed with other people recruited a dorsal frontoparietal control network, with the two networks being inversely correlated. Responses in the vmPFC and LpSTS predicted behavioral self-bias effects. Effective connectivity analyses showed that the vmPFC and the LpSTS were functionally coupled, with the strength of coupling associated with behavioral self-biases. The data show that assignment of personal social significance affects perceptual matching by coupling internal self-representations to brain regions modulating attentional responses to external stimuli.
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