关键词: 自我姓名, 熟悉性, 注意瞬脱, 知觉负载, RSVP

Abstract: The processing of self-name is known as unique that it have no need of attentional resource. The evidences from both behavioral and electrophysiological studies in which the spatial focus of attention is explicitly manipulated have showed that no attention is required for self-name processing. But there have new evidence from an fMRI that the differences between own and other's name processing may rather be quantitative than qualitative in nature and there is evidence that personal names do not always survive the attentional blink under the high perceptual load, but the study ignores the familiarity of personal names, so it can not make conclusion about the uniqueness of self name relatively. The present study was aim to investigate the mechanism of personal names processing by combining the Load Theory and RSVP of attentional blink (AB) paradigm, and to investigated the advantage of recognize self-name is due to the uniqueness or familiarity of the self-name, we added the names of celebrity to this study. We hypothesized that in attentional blink paradigm the familiar other's name produced a similar pattern of process to personal name, the process of personal name has relative uniqueness. In present study, each trial consisted of a first target (T1, consisted of 5 arrows) and a second target (T2, a stranger’s name or a celebrity’s name or self-name ) embedded in a rapid series visual presentation (RSVP) of 20 common nouns. The Eriksen flanker task was used to distinguish the level of T1 perceptual load in which the participants were asked to determine the orientation of central arrow between other 4 congruent (low-load condition) or incongruent (high-load condition) arrows. All 22 items were presented on the black background of computer screen and immediately followed by sequential items. The possible intervals between T1 and T2 were Lag-2 (SOA 64ms), Lag-9 (SOA 504ms), 30 undergraduate and graduate students were instructed to make the identification response to the central arrow of the T1 item (left or right) and the identification response to the gender of the name(male or female). T1 load conditions were separately presented in two blocks and the order of these two blocks was counterbalanced across the participants. The T1 identification accuracy and the T2 detection accuracy in all conditions were recorded respectively. The result of this study showed that for low-load conditions, compared to stranger-name, both of self-name and celebrity-name were detected more often than stranger-name, showing the advantages of personal name and celebrity name. However, the advantage was hampered significantly in the high-load condition and the detection of stranger-names were not affected by the increased T1 load, suggesting that the privileged access of self-name and celebrity-name to awareness were more sensitive to the current available processing resources, but in the condition of “low-load and shot-lag”, self-name showed the unique advantage of detection, while the advantage of celebrity-names disappeared. The result of this study shows that the uniqueness of personal name processing is not absolute but relative.

Key words: self-name, familiarity, attentional blink, perceptual load, RSVP