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Attention and automaticity in the processing of self-relevant information.

1982; American Psychological Association; Volume: 43; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1037/0022-3514.43.3.425

1939-1315

John A. Bargh,

Neuroscience and Music Perception

A neglected aspect of the study of social cognition has been the way in which people select information for further processing from the vast amount available in social environments. A major contemporary model of attention holds that there are two separate types of processes that operate concurrently: a flexible but resource-limited control process that regulates the contents of conscious awareness, and a relatively inflexible automatic process that can attract attention to stimuli without conscious intent. Passive automatic processes, can either facilitate or inhibit active attentional processing, necessitating either less or more attentional effort, depending on the characteristics of the information that is currently present. On a dichotic listening task in which subjects attended to or ignored self-relevant stimuli, it was found that self-relevant information required less attentional resources when presented to the attended channel, but more when presented to the rejected channel, relative to neutral words. This differential capacity allocation occurred despite subjects' lack of awareness of the contents of the rejected channel. The results supported the existence and interaction of the two processes of attention in social information processing.