You do not find your own face faster; you just look at it longer

摘要

Previous studies investigating the ability of high priority stimuli to grab attention reachedcontradictory outcomes. The present study used eye tracking to examine the effect of thepresence of the self-face among other faces in a visual search task in which the face identitywas task-irrelevant. We assessed whether the self-face (1) received prioritized selection (2)caused a difficulty to disengage attention, and (3) whether its status as target or distractorhad a differential effect. We included another highly familiar face to control whether pos-sible effects were self-face specific or could be explained by high familiarity. We found thatthe self-face interfered with the search task. This was not due to a prioritized processingbut rather to a difficulty to disengage attention. Crucially, this effect seemed due to theself-face's familiarity, as similar results were obtained with the other familiar face, andwas modulated by the status of the face since it was stronger for targets than fordistractors.