Hearing own or other’s name has different effects on monotonous task performance

We examined the effect of hearing two types of self-relevant words, one’s own name and the name of others, on vigilant attention, arousal, and subjective sleepiness during performing the Psychomotor Vigilance Test (PVT). Participants performed the PVT under three experimental conditions, (a) hearing own full name (high self-relevant condition), (b) hearing other’s name (low self- relevant condition) and (c) the control condition with no stimuli. Participants heard the names every 20 sec. Self-relevance was assessed before the experiment using the self-relevance scale. The results of the behavioral effects are relatively small and not consistently supported by all of the performance indicators. A tentative conclusion, based on the overall pattern of results, is that (1) arousal increased by hearing a name, regardless of its self-relevance, and (2) hearing less self-relevant stimuli such as other’s name had a distractive effect on ongoing task performance, although it increased arousal, being aware that further experiments are urgently necessary.