A core prediction of models of social-cognitive functioning is that attention is preferentially tuned to self-relevant material. Surprisingly, however, evidence in support of this viewpoint is scant. Remedying this situation, here we demonstrated that self-relevance influences the distribution of attentional resources during decisional processing. In a flanker task (N = 60), participants reported if to-be-judged stimuli either denoted, or were owned by, the self or a friend. A consistent pattern of results emerged across both judgment tasks. Whereas the identification of friend-related targets was speeded when the items were flanked by compatible compared with incompatible flankers, responses to self-related targets were resistant to flanker interference. Probing the origin of these effects, a further computational analysis (i.e., Shrinking Spotlight Diffusion Model analysis) confirmed that self-relevance impacted the focusing of attention during decision-making. These findings highlight how self-relevance modulates attentional processing.

社会认知功能模型的核心预测是注意力优先调整到与自身相关的材料。然而，令人惊讶的是，支持这一观点的证据很少。为了纠正这种情况，我们在这里证明了自我相关性会影响决策过程中注意力资源的分布。在侧卫任务 ( N= 60），参与者报告要判断的刺激是否表示或属于自己或朋友。两种判断任务都出现了一致的结果模式。与不兼容的侧翼相比，当项目被兼容的侧翼包围时，与朋友相关的目标的识别速度更快，而对自相关目标的反应则可以抵抗侧翼的干扰。探索这些影响的起源，进一步的计算分析（即收缩聚光灯扩散模型分析）证实，自我相关性影响了决策过程中的注意力集中。这些发现强调了自我相关性如何调节注意力处理。