When "It" becomes "Mine": attentional biases triggered by object ownership.

Previous research has demonstrated that higher-order cog- nitive processes associated with the allocation of selective atten- tion are engaged when highly familiar self-relevant items are encountered, such as oneðs name, face, personal possessions and the like. The goal of our study was to determine whether these effects on attentional processing are triggered on-line at the moment self-relevance is established. In a pair of experi- ments, we recorded ERPs as participants viewed common ob- jects (e.g., apple, socks, and ketchup) in the context of an “ownership” paradigm, where the presentation of each object was followed by a cue indicating whether the object nominally belonged either to the participant (a “self” cue) or the experi- menter (an “other” cue). In Experiment 1, we found that “self” ownership cues were associated with increased attentional pro- cessing, as measured via the P300 component. In Experiment 2, we replicated this effect while demonstrating that at a visual– perceptual level, spatial attention became more narrowly fo- cused on objects owned by self, as measured via the lateral occipital P1 ERP component. Taken together, our findings indi- cate that self-relevant attention effects are triggered by the act of taking ownership of objects associated with both perceptual and postperceptual processing in cortex.