Don't Listen to Yourself!

Our own voice is a very special stimulus, belonging to those we encounter most often. It is an important part of our representation in the world and a key communication tool. Other self-relevant stimuli such as our own name are known for their particularly high attention-grabbing potential, albeit it is unclear whether this is in fact due to their self-relevance or the strong call for action. In this pre-registered conceptual replication study, we compared the disruptive effect of one's own voice to that of another person's voice to investigate whether a self-relevant stimulus without a strong call for action still has the capacity to capture our attention. We used a classic serial recall paradigm with three auditory conditions: (1) A quiet control condition; (2) an own voice condition, in which participants listened to an artificially generated clone of their own voice; and (3) an other voice condition, where participants listened to the voice of their yoked-control partner. We found no difference in recall performance between the own and other voice conditions, suggesting that not all self-relevant stimuli automatically capture our attention, but only those that our cognitive system considers behaviorally relevant at the moment.