I saw mine first: A prior-entry effect for newly acquired ownership

Previous research has shown that attentional sets can be tuned to implicitly prioritize awareness of universally aversive or rewarding stimuli. But can mere ownership modulate implicit attentional prioritization as well? In Experiments 1 and 2, participants learned whether everyday objects belonged to them (self-owned) or the experimenter (other-owned) and completed a temporal order judgment task in which pairs of stimuli appeared onscreen with staggered timing. Results revealed a prior-entry effect, in which participants were more likely to report seeing a self-owned object first when 2 objects appeared simultaneously. In Experiment 3, no ownership status was assigned and no such effect was observed. Individual differences in the prior-entry effect were unrelated to independent self-construal, positive associations for self-owned objects, or loss aversion. These results suggest that attentional prioritization is not limited to universally salient stimuli. Rather, self-relevance, even when recently acquired, can engage an implicit attentional set that biases our perception of the environment. (PsycINFO Database Record