Abstract
We respond more quickly to our own face than to other faces, but there is debate over whether this is connected to attention-grabbing properties of the self-face. In two experiments, we investigate whether the self-face selectively captures attention, and the attentional conditions under which this might occur. In both experiments, we examined whether different types of face (self, friend, stranger) provide differential levels of distraction when processing self, friend and stranger names. In Experiment 1, an image of a distractor face appeared centrally – inside the focus of attention – behind a target name, with the faces either upright or inverted. In Experiment 2, distractor faces appeared peripherally – outside the focus of attention – in the left or right visual field, or bilaterally. In both experiments, self-name recognition was faster than other name recognition, suggesting a self-referential processing advantage. The presence of the self-face did not cause more distraction in the naming task compared to other types of face, either when presented inside (Experiment 1) or outside (Experiment 2) the focus of attention. Distractor faces had different effects across the two experiments: when presented inside the focus of attention (Experiment 1), self and friend images facilitated self and friend naming, respectively. This was not true for stranger stimuli, suggesting that faces must be robustly represented to facilitate name recognition. When presented outside the focus of attention (Experiment 2), no facilitation occurred. Instead, we report an interesting distraction effect caused by friend faces when processing strangers’ names. We interpret this as a “social importance” effect, whereby we may be tuned to pick out and pay attention to familiar friend faces in a crowd. We conclude that any speed of processing advantages observed in the self-face processing literature are not driven by automatic attention capture.
Highlights
We respond more quickly to our own face than to others [1,2,3], but we are unsure of the mechanism underlying this advantage
A 3-way repeated-measures ANOVA was carried out, with factors of Distractor Face, Target Name and Orientation, and with Reaction times (RT) to correct responses serving as the dependent variable
A 3-way repeated-measures ANOVA was carried out, with factors of Distractor Face, Target Name and Visual Field (LVF, RVF, bilateral), and with RT to correct responses serving as the dependent variable
Summary
We respond more quickly to our own face than to others [1,2,3], but we are unsure of the mechanism underlying this advantage. Research investigating whether our own face does selectively grab our attention has produced mixed findings, and studies have suffered from a lack of rigorous control in focus of attention. We report two experiments investigating whether the self-face does selectively capture our attention, and the attentional conditions under which this might be possible. One of the key questions in attention research revolves around how much information we process from stimuli that we are not directly attending to, and the circumstances in which these unattended stimuli can capture our attention (cf the Cocktail Party phenomenon; [4,5]). We can further investigate the phenomenon by measuring the effect of presenting task-irrelevant stimuli both inside and outside the focus of attention, enabling us to define the circumstances in which different classes of task-irrelevant stimuli selectively capture our attention
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