Host: The Japanese Society for Cognitive Psychology
In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the influences of social factors on visual attention. However, few empirical investigations have been carried out to reveal how self-construals modulate the spatial selection by visual attention. This study, therefore, set out to assess the effect of self-construals on the breadth of an attentional spotlight. The Eriksen flanker task was used to determine whether the interference from task-irrelevant flanking stimuli had been changed after self-construal manipulations. Furthermore, the spatial distances between each stimulus were varied in order to measure the extent to which the breadth of the attentional spotlight had been changed after the self-construal manipulations. The results indicate that participants who were manipulated to have interdependent self-construals were interfered by the flanking stimuli close to the target more than participants with independent self-construals, suggesting that the changes in self-construals modulate the breadth of the attentional spotlight.
