The self-reference effect on memory in early childhood

The self-reference effect in memory is the advantage for information encoded about self, relative to other people. The early development of this effect was explored here using a concrete encoding paradigm. Trials comprised presentation of a self- or other-image paired with a concrete object. In Study 1, 4- to 6-year-old children (N = 53) were asked in each trial whether the child pictured would like the object. Recognition memory showed an advantage for self-paired objects. Study 2 (N = 55) replicated this finding in source memory. In Study 3 (N = 56), participants simply indicated object location. Again, recognition and source memory showed an advantage for self-paired items. These findings are discussed with reference to mechanisms that ensure information of potential self-relevance is reliably encoded

Attention and person perception : the dynamics of distractor processing

Categorisation, whereby people are thought of in terms of their applicable social categories (e.g., age, sex, race) is a common tactic employed by the social perceiver in order to make sense of others. Is this facet of the person perception process inevitable however?  One factor which may modulate category activation is task-relevancy.  To explore this issue, participants were required to categorise verbal stimuli while ignoring task-irrelevant response matching and mismatching distractors under various experimental conditions.  The initial issue of interest was whether capacity limits in visual attention moderate the extraction of sex and identity cues from face and object distractors. The results revealed that perceivers could prevent identification of multiple faces and objects, but were unable to prevent categorizing both one and two faces by sex (Expts. 1 and 2).  In addition, participants extracted sex cues from to-be-ignored face distractors when they were presented in a predictable spatial location (Expt. 3).  Distractor repetition also failed to moderate perceivers’ ability to prevent categorizing task-irrelevant faces by sex (Expts. 4, 5 and 6).  However, repetition did modulate the sex categorization of name distractors (Expt. 7), and also face identification (Expt. 8).  Mismatching face flankers also continued to interfere with a sex-classification task even if they were inverted (Expt. 9).  Crucially, however, perceivers were able to prevent sex category activation if hair cues were cropped from the facial distractors (Expt. 10).  Extending this finding, faces displaying counter-stereotyped hairstyles (i.e., males with long hair and females with short hair) produced categorical errors, whereby the hair length and not the internal facial features drove category activation of both unfamiliar (Expt. 11), and familiar faces (Expt. 12).  Provided that category specifying features are present and sufficient to trigger response competition, distractor processing therefore appears to be inevitable.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo