iPhone therefore iAttend: Ownership over iPhones moderates behavioral responses of visuo-spatial attention.

We used discrimination and detection cueing paradigms to measure how the presence and location of personal property directs visuo-spatial attention in the right and left hemispace. We manipulated property ownership with mobile Smartphones (Apple iPhones c ) presented adjacent to the computer monitor and horizontally aligned with experimental stimuli. Smartphones belonged to either the participant or the experimenter. Participants wrote a message (a significant other’s name) into either the Experimenter’s phone or their own. We calculated the cueing cost (Invalid - Valid trials) to measure orienting and re-orienting of spatial attention. There was a subtle effect of ownership with predictive cueing, such that, a significant difference was found between targets presented to the left
compared with the right but only when the Experimenter’s phone was used to write the message. When the cue was irrelevant (non-predictive cueing) and the Experimenter’s phone was presented, a larger cueing cost was found for when the Experimenter’s phone was used to write the message compared with when the Participant’s phone was used. This was specific for targets presented to the left. Collectively, the present findings implicate a modulatory role of ownership over the distribution of visuo-spatial attention.