2021 Volume 39 Issue 2 Pages 182-190
The influence of social factors on visual attention is an increasingly important area in experimental psychology. However, there has been a little investigation of how self-construal affects how spatial attention selects visual information. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the influence of self-construal on the breadth of attentional spotlight. The Eriksen flanker task was employed to ascertain whether the interference from task-irrelevant stimuli flanking a to-be-identified target is changed following self-construal manipulations. Furthermore, the interstimulus distances between flankers were varied in order to measure the extent to which the breadth of the attentional spotlight is modulated after the self-construal manipulations. Results suggest that changes in self-construal modulate the breadth of the attentional spotlight. Moreover, the findings cast new light on how attentional selection can be modulated by high-level, social factors.