Self salience across the age range

We have recently demonstrated that our perception is enhanced for stimuli that are associated with ourselves relative to stimuli that are associated with other people. That is, stimuli associated to ourselves have increased 'self salience'. There is also evidence that our tendency to prioritize ourselves increases as we age, and this may contribute to other changes in social cognition in older individuals - an example being the ability to see the view of other people. In this project we will conduct a detailed analysis of whether ageing leads to increases in self saliency in perception, and whether such effects predict stronger self-prioritization in higher-level tasks such as face recognition, memory and seeing the viewpoint of other people. In Part 1 of the project we will test whether the self-bias in perception is increased in older people, whether there are changes in particular perceptual processes, and how these changes in behaviour relate to changes in brain activity. Part 2 will evaluate two potential factors that might lead to alterations in self-bias - the reward and the emotional value of self-related information. Are age-related changes due to older adults showing stronger effects of reward and/or stronger effects of emotion on perception? In Part 3 we will assess if age-related changes in self salience in perception predict changes in higher-level tasks (face recognition, memory, seeing others' viewpoints). In addition, by testing brain lesioned patients with reduced self-bias in perception, we will evaluate if perceptual biases are required in order to generate self-prioritization effects in higher-level tasks. The project will provide a fine-grained analysis of whether and how self-related processing changes as we age.

The research will impact on academic communities within and outside the core discipline of cognitive psychology - including social psychology, old age psychology, cross-cultural psychology and including philosophy. Our recent demonstration, that self-association can tag a shape so that it is subsequently perceived better has the potential to change views of how perception operates. In the proposed project we extend this to evaluating if the self-tagging procedure represents a stable measure of self-bias, and if self-tagging can be used to measure changes in self bias as people age. These last two developments, if successful, will have impact on studies of ageing and on studies of personality (e.g., the measurement of self-bias may be useful in organizational psychology). In addition the work on memory in the project (Experiment 6) is predicted to show positive effects of self-association on learning new material, suggesting that the self-association procedure can be adopted to help learning - with applications in neuropsychology and ageing.

The potential for impact builds upon the wide influence of our previous work which has provided a standard theory of human visual attention (over 1500 citations, Psych. Review 1989). Our more recent work on modelling attention won the British Psychological Society's Cognitive Psychology Prize (Psych. Review, 2011). Our academic impact will be maintained by publishing the new work in high visibility journals and by presenting at leading international conferences. The impact of our work outside of the core discipline is indicated by keynote presentations to both computer science audiences (e.g., Applied Vision Association, 2009) and philosophy audiences (Mind & Language meetings 2006, 2009 and 2011).

The creation of a framework for understanding how self-related information modulates perception, and how this changes with age, will also be useful for practitioners working on disorders of attention (in ageing populations, in children with developmental disorders, in adults with acquired brain lesions). Particularly relevant here will be the proposed work using fMRI to provide a neural marker of the effects of aging on self-saliency (Experiment 3), the work examining how categorizing stimuli in relation to the self improves memory (Experiment 6) and the work using neuropsychological patients to test the necessary role of self-bias in perception (Experiment 7). If successful, this work can be extended to evaluate the utility of the imaging data as a biomarker of self-bias in ageing populations and to develop new means of enhancing memory in appropriate populations. To address researchers interested in the implications of the work for translational and diagnostic research, we will write reviews of the research for outlets open to non-specialist audiences (e.g., Trends in Cognitive Sciences; we have 3 papers in TICS over the past 5 years). To optimise the impact of the work on relevant user groups (e.g., older adults), we will create a web-site reporting the work. We also regularly produce a Newsletter for our participants and we will continue to do this on the proposed project, sending this out to all our volunteers. Finally, if our measure of self-bias in perception is stable and predictive of performance in higher-level tasks (Part 3 of the project), we will review whether it is possible to develop our novel test of biased perception as a psychometric instrument, useful for assessing individual differences in self-prioritization.
We have developed a spin-out company, Cognition Matters (linked to Isis Innovation, the commercial arm of Oxford University), which aims to take new assessment tools and to commercialise them for wider use in industry and the health service - an approach used successfully with the BCoS neuropsychological test battery (Humphreys et al., 2012, Psychology Press). If our new procedure is successful we will review if it too can be commercially developed.