Category Processing Based On Self-face And Self-trait Adjectives

Category processing involved three processes: category learning,class characterization and category construction.Throughout the category processing,there are two disputed: first dispute,category processing is based on explicit,rule processing or implicit,similarity processing;the second disputed,category processing is parallel processing system of single or two processing system.Previous researchs showed that self is the core structure of personality,it affected the process of cognition in different levels.In the process of perception and memory,it has been found stability of self-processing advantage effect.Category processing is a complicated cognitive process,it is assumed that classifiy self-related information is different from other-related information.We have discussed the category processing of self-related information by the description of the facial and personality traits as the stimulus of perceptual and semantic level processing,the research involved category learning,category representation and category construction.The first study investigated the category learning process of self-related information,including 2 experiments.Experiment 1 with a face as materials,required subjects learned to classify,and compared the self-face and other face in single and dual tasks in category learning process,based on rules and similar category structure learning to achieve a standard accurate rate.The results showed that self-reference group and other reference group in the face of category learning has no significant difference.Experiment 2 used personality adjectives as materials,follow the paradigm of Experiment 1,compared the difference between self-reference adjectives and otherreference adjectives,it was found,in a self-reference group the category of selfpersonality trait words learning by way of dual-system;and in other-reference group,the dual-task effect on rule-based and similarity-based category learning showed no difference.The second study investigated the self-related information in category representation,including 2 experiments,to explore the rules and the similarity representation.Experiment 1 used face as material,compared self-and others category representation,it was found self-face was significant different in representation between other-face.People use similarity to represent self face and the use both similarity and rules to represent other-face.Experiment 2 used adjectives as materials.The effects of the self-reference,other reference,and no reference category representation of differences,it was found,other groups and no reference group tend to use the rules and other means to characterize the category;while the self-information is the rule and similarity of the two representations.The third study examined the category construction of self-related information,including 2 experiments.Experiment 1a used real faces as materials,compared the difference between self-face and other-face in category construction,the results showed that in the face of construction,self-and others had no significant difference,both of which used two kinds of strategys;Experiment 1b used abstract face as materials,the same comparison of the self-and others relevant information category construction.The results found that in self-reference condition,subjects were more in the use of the single dimension rule classification categories;in others reference condition is using two kinds of classification.Experiment 2 adjectives are used as materials.To explore the effects of self-and others related information processing differences in category construction.It is found that in the others group,people prefer to use similarity stragegy to construct category while in the self group people used two kinds of strategys to construc category.The results of the three studies showd specific processing of self-related information in classification.The difference between self and others were showed both in the performance and category strategies.Self-related information performed better than other-related information,showed by higher accurate rate and less reaction time.For the category strategy,the category of face and adjective stimuli were affected by the top-down processing,showd rule-based and similarity-based strategies,and the two kinds of strategies were dynamic in the processing.Discussing of the self-related information in category processing is helpful for understanding the social classify of self and also contribute to understand the category processing.