The self-face automatically captures attention without consciousness

Abstract

It is intuitively clear and experimentally well established that stimuli representing ourselves, like our own name or face, benefit from preferential processing. However, two questions remain to be addressed. First, does the prioritization mechanism operate in an automatic manner during an early processing, or rather in a more controlled fashion at later processing stages? Second, which of the reported effects are specific to self-related stimuli, and which can also be observed for other familiar or salient stimuli? We used a dot-probe task and an N2pc ERP component analysis to investigate attentional mechanism of the self-face perception and to tackle both questions. The former, by employing a backwards masking procedure to render faces subliminal and thus isolate the early and preconscious processing stages. The latter, by investigating whether a face that is only visually familiar captures attention in a similar manner to the self-face. We demonstrate that both conscious and unconscious perception of the self-face image results in a robust attention capture, which indicates an early and automatic self-prioritization mechanism. Further, the visually familiar face did not attract attention in the conscious condition, suggesting that the attentional prioritization was specific to a self-referential stimulus. Unexpectedly, the visually familiar face did attract attention, but only in the second half of the unconscious block, after a sufficient number of presentations. Such attention shifts to an already visually familiar, but still highly degraded stimulus, might facilitate its’ recognition. More generally, our study provides further evidence supporting a dissociation between attention and consciousness.