title: Dynamically orienting your own face facilitates the automatic attraction of attention.
abstract: We report two experiments showing that dynamically orienting our own face facilitates the automatic attraction of attention. We had participants complete a cueing task where they had to judge the orientation of a lateralized target cued by a central face that dynamically changed its orientation. Experiment 1 showed a reliable cueing effect from both self- and friend-faces at a long stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), however, the self-faces exclusively generated a spatial cueing effect at a short SOA. In Experiment 2, event-related potential (ERP) data to the face cues showed larger amplitudes in the N1 component for self-faces relative to friend- and unfamiliar-faces. In contrast, the amplitude of the P3 component was reduced for self compared with friend- and unfamiliar-other cues. The size of the self-bias effect in N1 correlated with the strength of self-biases in P3. The results indicate that dynamic changes in the orientation of one's own face can provide a strong ecological cue for attention, enhancing sensory responses (N1) and reducing any subsequent uncertainty (P3) in decision-making.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychology , Tsinghua University , Beijing , China.|b Department of Psychology , Haerbin Normal University , Haebin , China.
authors.forename: Minghui
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: c Department of Psychology , Bournemouth University , Dorset , UK.
authors.forename: Xun
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: He
authors.affiliation: d School of Psychology , University of Birmingham , Birmingham , UK.
authors.forename: Pia
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Rotsthein
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychology , Tsinghua University , Beijing , China.|e Department of Experimental Psychology , University of Oxford , Oxford , UK.
authors.forename: Jie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Sui
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D000066499:Facial Recognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012938:Social Perception; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Attentional attraction; Cueing effect; N1; P3; Self-bias