Interaction between spatial perception and self-relevance: Self-relevance improves the discrimination of distance...

Discriminating the distance of a sound source from oneself contributes to the representation of the bodily self and may interact with the analysis of its self-relevance, but the mechanisms underlying the relationship between spatial and content processing remain underexplored. The present study investigated whether the self-relevance of a sound (own vs. unfamiliar first names) influenced listeners' discrimination of source distance from themselves for sounds simulated in peripersonal and extrapersonal space. Distance discrimination was also assessed in a stimulus-centered task, in which listeners judged distances relative to an external auditory reference rather than to their own body. In the body-centered task, performance was better for self-relevant than for non-self-relevant stimuli in the extrapersonal space. In the stimulus-centered task, no comparable own-name effect was revealed under the present design. These findings suggest that spatial and semantic content processes may interact under specific conditions rather than operating fully independently.