Shapiro, Caldwell, & Sorensen (1997) Personal names and the attentional blink: A visual "cocktail party" effect

Shapiro, K. L., Caldwell, J. & Sorensen, R. E. (1997) Personal names and the attentional blink: A visual "cocktail party" effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 23(2), 504-514.

"Treisman (1960) proposed that the filter is not an "all or nothing" mechanism but instead serves to attenuate rather than to block information from the unattended channel. According to her views, a node for a particular word in a mental "dictionary" possesses a threshold that must be exceeded for that word to reach "awareness." Information from the unattended channel is transformed in such a way as to make it less likely that the information will activate a particular node. Thus, only words with very low thresholds can be activated by the unattended channel. For example, words with high salience, such as fire or an individual's name, have thresholds for activation that are permanently lower than those for other words and can reach awareness even when presented to the unattended channel." p. 506

Sounds almost like... "ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS"  if not all stimuli are euqual but some stimuli are more equal than others.  8-X

"As posed originally by Shapiro, Raymond, and Amell (1994) but elaborated on here, each competing stimulus possesses a different weighting according to its salience, which is determined by a goodness-of-fit match between target and probe templates and the level of word logogen activation."

When can I stop weighting my selves so much?

"we suggest that certain words possess a permanently lower threshold (and thus a higher salience), as

in the case of a person's own name or a signal for danger. We further argue that the consequence of this higher salience is less interference between the probe stimulus and other competing items in VSTM."

salience vs. threshold level

"One's own name, by this same account, possesses an even higher salience allowing for its detection regardless of the distractor stream."

Again, the basis of my minor inconveniences in life... I surely know no moderation and taken the own name effect to the extreme... like You can call me Al (or Betty will do) though I am ratprincess.