Self-prioritization and the attentional systems

Highlights

• Self-processing interacts with all the three attentional systems (alerting, orienting, and executive control) to produce optimal behavior.

• Self-prioritization effects occur in a bottom-up manner but also can be set-up ‘on the fly’ in line with a top-down effect of knowledge.

• Self-reference as a global modulator of attentional processing.

Humans prioritize stimuli related to themselves rather than to other people. How we control these priorities is poorly understood, though it is relevant to the nature of self-processing and a wide range of neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders, from cases of strokes, dementia to depression and schizophrenia. We update the Self-Attention Network proposed in 2016 by evaluating how self-prioritization interacts with Peterson and Posner’s three attentional systems: alerting, orienting and executive control, based on evidence on a variety of behavioral and neuroscientific studies with healthy participants and patients with brain lesions. We suggest that all the three attentional networks contribute to self-prioritization. Understanding the nature of self-prioritization in attentional contexts may provide important clinical implications for a variety of disorders related to self-processing.

Introduction

Human attention is tuned by self-related information. Currently, we know relatively little about which and how the attentional system(s) are tuned by self-related stimuli though the question is critical for understanding both the long-standing issue of what the nature of self-processing is and how human attention operates in social contexts. The aim of this paper is to elucidate the relations between self-processing and attentional functions. The review will provide evidence that self-related information act as a global modulator of attentional processing including orienting, arousal and executive control.

There is now considerable evidence indicating that people prioritize information related to themselves relative to other people. The effects of self-prioritization are pervasive. For example, memory is better for information that relates to ourselves than others [1, 2, 3]. Self-related information attract attention automatically [4, 5, 6] and one’s own face is responded to faster and more accurately than the faces of other people [7, 8, 9]. Self-prioritization even affects simple perceptual matching judgments [10,11]. In this task, people form associations between neutral stimuli (equally familiar) and personal significant labels (e.g. you, friend and stranger). Matching performances are better for self-associations than for the associations related to other people.

The most important account of self-prioritization is that the effects are driven by tuning attention toward self-related information [4]. In 2016, Humphreys and Sui proposed the Self-Attention Network (SAN) to help understand the nature of self-prioritization in attentional contexts. The review focused on the evidence of the self-name, self-face, and self-perception effects on attention. The authors argued that self-prioritization emerges through an interaction between regions within the self-network (the cortical midline structure, specifically the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, vmPFC) and regions within the executive control network [12^••]. The impact of executive functions on self-related processing has also been noted in developmental research, where executive functions are associated with the development of self-control [13]. Going beyond this, the present article extends the SAN by evaluating and discussing the relationships between self-processing and the entire attentional system proposed by Petersen and Posner [14,15^••]. This discussion unifies cognitive, neuroimaging and neuropsychological research findings on the interactions between self-processing and the attentional systems.

An influential theory of attention postulates that attention is composed of three distinct neuro-cognitive networks: alerting, orienting and executive control [14,15^••]. The alerting network controls participant’s arousal and vigilance, and supports sustaining of attention over time. It is controlled by the norepinephrine (NE) circuit, originating in the brain stem and spreading across the cerebrum. The alerting network is associated with rapid phasic changes of vigilance (e.g. in response to a stimulus onset) or tonic state (e.g. as a function of the sleep–wake cycle). The orienting network prioritizes sensory input by enhancing processing resources to specific location, modality or object. It is controlled by the acetylcholine circuit. The orientating network is divided into two functions. Orientation to a target based on prior knowledge (e.g. spatial cue) is mediated via a lateral dorsal fronto-parietal network including the frontal eye field and intra-parietal sulcus (IPS). The second orienting subsystem is mediated via the ventral fronto-parietal network including the inferior frontal region and temporal–parietal junction. The latter is driven by the stimulus. It is typically measured by the ability to switch prioritization, re-orienting to a new target location. Finally, the executive control network reflects a top down regulation mechanism that creates the task set, ensures task goals being maintained, and monitors for conflict and error. It is mediated through at least two neural circuits: a lateral fronto-parietal and a medial frontal-insula.

How these attentional networks interact with the critical processes that affect our everyday lives and that are more social in nature is unclear. Research so far focused on the interaction between the attentional networks and emotions [16, 17, 18, 19]. For example, using the attentional network test, Fan et al. reported interaction between emotions and the executive control network [20]. Humphreys and Sui suggested that personal significance affects behavior through the interaction with the self-network (especially in the vmPFC) and the executive control system [12^••]. Here we extend the SAN by systematically evaluating the evidence of how social processing, with a focus on self-relevance, interacts with the entire attentional systems (Figure 1). We argue that self-processing acts as a modulator of the alertness and orienting systems, while it runs counter to the function of the executive control when the self-related information is irrelevant to task requirements and individual goals.