Self-prioritization and the attentional systems

Abstract

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.