Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Self is a central construct for various phenomenon in the history of psychology, and the pattern of being biased towardsthe information related to self is known as self-reference effect. Ones own face presents a unique stimuli to look at thecognitive processing self-reference effect. With help of two experiments, we investigated self-referential effect for facesand its relationship with attention. The first experiment looked at processing advantage for self-face compared to friendsface and a strangers face while participants performed orthogonal task of emotion perception. The second experimentinvolved manipulation of attention prior to emotion perception task used in experiment 1. Results indicate that RT forself-face were significantly shorter compared to friend face and stranger face. This processing advantage disappearedwhen cues were used prior to the attention task. We suggest that self-faces enhance processing by attentional capture.