title: The salient self: the left intraparietal sulcus responds to social as well as perceptual-salience after self-association.
abstract: Perceptual learning is associated with experience-based changes in stimulus salience. Here, we use a novel procedure to show that learning a new association between a self-label and a neutral stimulus produces fast alterations in social salience measured by interference when targets associated with other people have to be selected in the presence of self-associated distractors. Participants associated neutral shapes with either themselves or a friend, over a short run of training trials. Subsequently, the shapes had to be identified in hierarchical (global-local) forms. The data show that giving a shape greater personal significance by associating it with the self had effects on visual selection equivalent to altering perceptual salience. Similar to previously observed effects linked to when perceptually salient distractors are ignored, effects of a self-associated distractor also increased activation in the left intraparietal cortex sulcus. The results show that self-associations to sensory stimuli rapidly modulate neural responses in a manner similar to changes in perceptual saliency. The self-association procedure provides a new way to understand how personal significance affects behavior.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Center for Biomedical Imaging Research, Biomedical Engineering Department, School of Medicine, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK.
authors.forename: Jie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Sui
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Northeast Normal University, Chuangchun 130024, China.
authors.forename: Minghui
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK.
authors.forename: Carmel
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Mevorach
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK.
authors.forename: Glyn W
authors.initials: GW
authors.lastname: Humphreys
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010296:Parietal Lobe / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D012649:Self Concept; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: fMRI; hierarchical stimuli; perceptual salience; self-association; ultrafast learning