PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Bola, Michał
AU  - Paź, Marta
AU  - Doradzińska, Łucja
AU  - Nowicka, Anna
TI  - The self-face automatically captures attention without consciousness
AID  - 10.1101/2020.01.22.915595
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.01.22.915595
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/01/23/2020.01.22.915595.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/01/23/2020.01.22.915595.full
AB  - 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.Significance statement The ability to recognize ourselves lies at the heart of self-consciousness. It is well known that stimuli representing or associated with “self” are processed preferentially by our cognitive system. In the present study we show that an image of our own face indeed robustly attracts attention. Importantly, even when participants were not aware that their own face was presented - due to a very short display time and a “masking” procedure - their attention was shifted to the invisible self-face image. This indicates that the mechanism of self-prioritization is very rapid, automatic, and occurs at early stages of visual processing. More generally, our study provides evidence that attention can operate and select salient stimuli even in the absence of awareness.