Face/Agent Interference in Individual and Social Context

Abstract

Two experiments studied the impact of irrelevant background faces on Go responses to imperative signals superimposed on them. Two major results were obtained. The first concerns a response time advantage of one's own face and a related advantage of familiar over unfamiliar faces. When the imperative signal was superimposed on the responding agent's own face, or the face of a sibling or friend, Go responses were faster as compared to unfamiliar faces. The second concerns the impact of social context. A slight increase of the own-face advantage was observed when the task was performed together with a co-actor. Importantly, this increase was only observed for unfamiliar, not familiar co-actors. The implications of these results are discussed in a framework for stimulus-based response selection which relies on two factors, face familiarity and face/agent compatibility.