You are not enough: Inefficient search strategies persist for self-relevant targets

Does our conception of a target affect how we look for it? Previous investigations have shown that search for an object with a unique identity is more efficient than search based on unique orientation. Here we asked whether giving an orientation target an identity label is sufficient to boost search efficiency. Participants completed two blocks of search for a line tilted 45 ̊ to the right. Between blocks we induced an identity-based connection between the participant and search target using the self-reference effect (SRE): participants learned to associate the target to the label “you” and distractor lines to the label “strangers”. A second experiment used the same paradigm but introduced a more intuitive relationship between the label and the object form by embedding the line in a circle and adding two dots to create face pictograms. The results of both experiments replicated the standard SRE as measured by reaction time, but search was similarly inefficient when the instructions were to search “for you” as they were in search for orientation. The results suggest search strategies are not strongly influenced by how a target is conceived, ruling out an intuitively appealing explanation for the large individual differences typically observed in search performance.