Brain Activity in Fairness Consideration during Asset Distribution: Does the Initial Ownership Play a Role?

Previous behavioral studies have shown that initial ownership influences individuals’ fairness consideration and other-regarding behavior. However, it is not entirely clear whether initial ownership influences the brain activity when a recipient evaluates the fairness of asset distribution. In this study, we randomly assigned the bargaining property (monetary reward) to either the allocator or the recipient in the ultimatum game and let participants of the study, acting as recipients, receive either disadvantageous unequal, equal, or advantageous unequal offers from allocators while the event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. Behavioral results showed that participants were more likely to reject disadvantageous unequal and equal offers when they initially owned the property as compared to when they did not. The two types of unequal offers evoked more negative going ERPs (the MFN) than the equal offers in an early time window and the differences were not modulated by the initial ownership. In a late time window, however, the P300 responses to division schemes were affected not only by the type of unequal offers but also by whom the property was initially assigned to. These findings suggest that while the MFN may function as a general mechanism that evaluates whether the offer is consistent or inconsistent with the equity rule, the P300 is sensitive to top-down controlled processes, into which factors related to the allocation of attentional resources, including initial ownership and personal interests, come to play

Mine or mother’s? Exploring the self-ownership effect across cultures

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Object ownership and action: the influence of social context and choice on the physical manipulation of personal property

Understanding who owns what is important for guiding appropriate action in a social context. Previously, we demonstrated that ownership influences our kinematic patterns associated with hand-object interactions (Constable et al. in Cognition 119(3):430-437, 2011). Here, we present a series of experiments aimed at determining the underlying mechanisms associated with this effect. We asked participants to lift mugs that differed in terms of ownership status (Experiments 1 and 2) and personal preference (Experiment 3) while recording spatial and acceleration measures. In Experiment 1, participants lifted their own mug with greater acceleration and drew it closer to themselves than they did the experimenter's mug. They also lifted the experimenter's mug further to the right compared with other mugs. In Experiment 2, spatial trajectory effects were preserved, but the acceleration effect abolished, when the owner of the 'other-owned' mug was a known-but absent-confederate. Experiment 3 demonstrated that merely choosing to use a mug was not sufficient to elicit rightward drift or acceleration effects. We suggest that these findings reflect separate and distinct mechanisms associated with socially related visuomotor processing

Self-prioritization during stimulus processing is not obligatory.

An emerging literature has suggested that self-relevance automatically enhances stimulus processing (i.e., the self-prioritization effect). Specifically, during shape-label matching tasks, geometric shapes associated with the self are identified more rapidly than comparable stimuli paired with other targets (e.g., friend, stranger). Replicating and extending work that challenges the putative automaticity of this effect, here we hypothesized that self-relevance facilitates stimulus processing only when task sets draw attention to previously formed shape-label associations in memory. The results of a shape-classification task confirmed this prediction. Compared to shapes associated with a friend, those paired with the self were classified more rapidly when participants were required to report who the stimulus denoted (i.e., self or friend). In contrast, self-relevance failed to facilitate performance when participants judged either what the shape was (i.e., triangle or square, diamond or circle) or where it was located on the screen (i.e., above or below fixation). These findings further elucidate the conditions under which self-relevance does-and does not-influence stimulus processing