Self - Face Unique Processing And Sharing

Previous studies found that face perception is of great significance in vision recognition. Recently more and more studies use eye tracking skills in face perception due to its high ecological validity. A variety of psychological, biological and socio-cultural factors may account for differences in face perception. Studies of the self-face advantage reveal that the processing of one’s own face is unique; Adults manifest special self-face recognition, responding faster to self faces in visual search or face orientation identification tasks. Some behavioral data showed that lover-referential processing was comparable with self-referential processing in memory performance. The present study attempts to examine the differences and similarities of self-face, lover’s face and unfamiliar faces by recording the participants’eye movements; we also try to test the attentional bias when Chinese observers processing their own face, lover’ faces and unfamiliar faces.In experiment1,34participants (17pairs in love) were presented with photographs of their own, their lovers, famous stars’face and unfamiliar faces in different views to complete a face orientation identification task. We found that participants identify the orientation of one’s own face and lover’s face faster than famous stars’face or unfamiliar faces, there was no significant difference between the reaction time of self face and lover’s face.In experiment2, eye tracker was used to test weather Chinese observers show self-face advantage in visual search task. All30participants showed an advantage for both self face and lover’s face, as evidenced by "first time to arrive at the target"; with no difference between searching self and lover’s face, but faster than unfamiliar faces.In experiment3,34participants (17pairs in love) were presented with photographs of their own, their lovers and unfamiliar faces. Participants were asked to indicate whether or not the two face images displayed simultaneously were of the same person. We found that there was more sampling of the internal regions not only for one’s own face and lover’s face but also for unfamiliar faces. Our results also suggest that Chinese individuals using similar eye movement patterns when they viewing self face and lover’ face.Consistent with Experiment2, Participants find face displayed a target mouth (阿or屋) faster when the target mouths were displayed by self and lover than by unfamiliar face in Experiment4. Therefore, this results also suggest that Chinese individuals Shared representations between self and intimate significant others (lover)In Experiment5, we investigated whether self face can capture attention more than other familiar or unfamiliar face in mixed saccadic paradigms. Eye movements were recorded in32participants who performed either pro-or anti-saccades to self face, lover’s face, or unfamiliar face, randomly presented to the left or right of a fixation arrow. We report a significant decrease in pro-saccade error rates for self faces and lover’s face compared to unfamiliar face; meanwhile self faces retain attention longer in comparison to unfamiliar face in pro-saccades. Unexpectedly, we don’t find significant difference in the anti-saccade error rate or saccade latency among self face, lover’s face, and unfamiliar face.In Experiment6, we use cue-target task to elucidate the mechanism by which self face and lover’face gain processing priority.16participants completed a cue-target task that two of the self face, lover’s face, unfamiliar face and house pictures were presented simultaneously as cues. It was found that when both cues are face, there is no attentional bias between the valid cued position and the invalid cued position. The results revealed that in this cue-target task, there is no difference in the capture of attention among self face, lover’s face, and unfamiliar face.In sum, we found that although self face is processing differently from unfamiliar faces, there are more similarity in processing self face and lover’ face. To a certain extent, this results support the self with other shared representation model. Future research may employ more about the reasons of the self-face advantage and the attentional bias of self face.