Self-relevance exerts a powerful influence on information processing. Compared to material associated with other people, personally meaningful stimuli are prioritized during decision-making. Further exploring the character of this effect, here we considered the extent to which stimulus enhancement is impacted by the frequency of self-relevant versus friend-relevant material. In a matching task, participants reported whether shape-label stimulus pairs corresponded to previously learned associations (e.g., triangle = self, square = friend). Crucially however, before the task commenced, stimulus-based expectancies were provided indicating the probability with which both self- and friend-related shapes would be encountered. The results revealed that task performance was impacted by the frequency of stimulus presentation in combination with the personal relevance of the items. When self- and friend-related shapes appeared with equal frequencies, a self-prioritization effect emerged (Expt. 1). Additionally, in both confirmatory (Expt. 2) and dis-confirmatory (Expt. 3) task contexts, stimuli that were encountered frequently (vs. infrequently) were prioritized, an effect that was most pronounced for self-relevant (vs. friend-relevant) items. Further computational analyses indicated that, in each of the reported experiments, differences in performance were underpinned by variation in the rate of information uptake, with evidence extracted more rapidly from self-relevant compared to friend-relevant stimuli. These findings advance our understanding of the emergence and origin of stimulus-prioritization effects during decisional processing.

自我相关性对信息处理产生强大的影响。与与其他人相关的材料相比，个人有意义的刺激在决策过程中被优先考虑。进一步探索这种效应的特征，在这里我们考虑了刺激增强受自我相关与朋友相关材料频率影响的程度。在匹配任务中，参与者报告形状标签刺激对是否对应于先前学习的关联（例如，三角形 = 自我，正方形 = 朋友）。然而，至关重要的是，在任务开始之前，提供了基于刺激的期望值，表明遇到自我和朋友相关形状的概率。结果表明，任务表现受到刺激呈现频率以及项目的个人相关性的影响。当自我和朋友相关的形状以相同的频率出现时，就会出现自我优先效应（Expt. 1）。此外，在确认性（Expt. 2）和非确认性（Expt. 3）任务上下文中，经常遇到的刺激（与不经常遇到的）被优先考虑，这种效果对于自我相关（与朋友-相关）项目。进一步的计算分析表明，在每个报告的实验中，性能差异是由信息吸收率的变化所支撑的，与朋友相关的刺激相比，从自我相关的刺激中提取的证据更快。