Jie Sui

Cultural difference in neural mechanisms of self-recognition.

Abstract Self-construals are different between Western and East Asian cultures in that the Western self emphasizes self-focused attention more, whereas the East Asian self stresses the fundamental social connections between people more. To investigate whether such cultural difference in self-related processing extends to face recognition, we recorded event-related potentials from British and Chinese subjects while they judged head orientations of their own face or a familiar face in visual displays. For the British, the own-face induced faster responses and a larger negative activity at 280–340 ms over the frontal-central area (N2) relative to the familiar face. In contrast, the Chinese showed weakened self-advantage in behavioral responses and reduced anterior N2 amplitude to the own-face compared with the familiar face. Our findings suggest that enhanced social salience of ones own face results in different neurocognitive processes of self-recognition in Western and Chinese cultures.

Coupling social attention to the self forms a network for personal significance

Prior social psychological studies show that newly assigned personal significance can modulate high-level cognitive processes, e.g., memory and social evaluation, with self- and other-related information processed in dissociated prefrontal structure: ventral vs. dorsal, respectively. Here, we demonstrate the impact of personal significance on perception and show the neural network that supports this effect. We used an associative learning procedure in which we “tag” a neutral shape with a self-relevant label. Participants were instructed to associate three neutral shapes with labels for themselves, their best friend, or an unfamiliar other. Functional magnetic resonance imaging data were acquired while participants judged whether the shape-label pairs were maintained or swapped. Behaviorally, participants rapidly tagged a neutral stimulus with self-relevance, showing a robust advantage for self-tagged stimuli. Self-tagging responses were associated with enhanced activity in brain regions linked to self-representation [the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC)] and to sensory-driven regions associated with social attention [the left posterior superior temporal sulcus (LpSTS)]. In contrast, associations formed with other people recruited a dorsal frontoparietal control network, with the two networks being inversely correlated. Responses in the vmPFC and LpSTS predicted behavioral self-bias effects. Effective connectivity analyses showed that the vmPFC and the LpSTS were functionally coupled, with the strength of coupling associated with behavioral self-biases. The data show that assignment of personal social significance affects perceptual matching by coupling internal self-representations to brain regions modulating attentional responses to external stimuli.

Can beauty be ignored? Effects of facial attractiveness on covert attention

Facial beauty has important social and biological implications. Research has shown that people tend to look longer at attractive than at unattractive faces. However, little is known about whether an attractive face presented outside foveal vision can capture attention. The effect of facial attractiveness on covert attention was investigated in a spatial cuing task. Participants were asked to judge the orientation of a cued target presented to the left or right visual field while ignoring a task-irrelevant face image flashed in the opposite field. The presentation of attractive faces significantly lengthened task performance. The results suggest that facial beauty automatically competes with an ongoing cognitive task for spatial attention.

Dynamic cultural modulation of neural responses to one's own and friend's faces

Long-term cultural experiences influence neural response to ones own and friends faces. The present study investigated whether an individuals culturally specific pattern of neural activity to faces can be modulated by temporary access to other cultural frameworks using a self-construal priming paradigm. Event-related potentials were recorded from British and Chinese adults during judgments of orientations of ones own and friends faces after they were primed with independent and interdependent self-construals. We found that an early frontal negative activity at 220–340 ms (the anterior N2) differentiated between ones own and friends faces in both cultural groups. Most remarkably, for British participants, priming an interdependent self-construal reduced the default anterior N2 to their own faces. For Chinese participants, however, priming an independent self-construal suppressed the default anterior N2 to their friends faces. These findings indicate fast modulations of culturally specific neural responses induced by temporary access to other cultural frameworks.

Attentional control and the self: The Self-Attention Network (SAN).

Although there is strong evidence that human decision-making is frequently self-biased, it remains unclear whether self-biases mediate attention. Here we review evidence on the relations between self-bias effects in decision-making and attention. We ask: Does self-related information capture attention? Do self-biases modulate pre-attentive processes or do they depend on attentional resources being available? We review work on (1) own-name effects, (2) own-face effects, and (3) self-biases in associative matching. We argue that self-related information does have a differential impact on the allocation of attention and that it can alter the saliency of a stimulus in a manner that mimics the effects of perceptual-saliency. However, there is also evidence that self-biases depend on the availability of attentional resources and attentional expectancies for upcoming stimuli. We propose a new processing framework, the Self-Attention Network (SAN), in which neural circuits responding to self-related stimuli interact with circuits supporting attentional control, to determine our emergent behavior. We also discuss how these-bias effects may extend beyond the self to be modulated by the broader social context—for example, by cultural experience, by an in-group as opposed to an out-group stimulus, and by whether we are engaged in joint actions. Self-biases on attention are modulated by social context.

The Salient Self: The Left Intraparietal Sulcus Responds to Social as Well as Perceptual-Salience After Self-Association

Perceptual learning is associated with experience-based changes in stimulus salience. Here, we use a novel procedure to show that learning a new association between a self-label and a neutral stimulus produces fast alterations in social salience measured by interference when targets associated with other people have to be selected in the presence of self-associated distractors. Participants associated neutral shapes with either themselves or a friend, over a short run of training trials. Subsequently, the shapes had to be identified in hierarchical (global-local) forms. The data show that giving a shape greater personal significance by associating it with the self had effects on visual selection equivalent to altering perceptual salience. Similar to previously observed effects linked to when perceptually salient distractors are ignored, effects of a self-associated distractor also increased activation in the left intraparietal cortex sulcus. The results show that self-associations to sensory stimuli rapidly modulate neural responses in a manner similar to changes in perceptual saliency. The self-association procedure provides a new way to understand how personal significance affects behavior.

Five-year-olds can show the self-reference advantage

The current study developed a new paradigm to determine the age at which children begin to show the self-reference advantage in memory. Four-, 5-, and 10-year-olds studied lists of colourful object pictures presented together with self or other face image, and participants were asked to report aloud “who is pointing at the (object).” Then incidental free recall was carried out, followed by source judgments based on the earlier test where participants had to distinguish who pointed to the object. In Experiment 1, only 5-year-old children showed self-reference advantage in the recall, but not in source judgments. By increasing task demand in Experiment 2, 5 and 10-year-olds also showed the self-reference advantage in the recall, but not in source judgments. These results indicated that the new paradigm is appropriate to measure childrens self-reference effect in memory, and children as young as 5 years begin to show this effect.

The automatic and the expected self: separating self- and familiarity biases effects by manipulating stimulus probability.

Attentional control over prepotent responses has previously been shown by manipulating the probability with which stimuli appear. Here, we examined whether prepotent responses to self-associated stimuli can be modulated by their frequency of occurrence. Participants were instructed to associate geometric shapes with the self, their mother, or a stranger before having to judge whether the sequential shape–label pairs matched or mismatched the instruction. The probability of the different shape–label pairs was varied. There was a robust advantage to self-related stimuli in all cases. Reducing the proportion of matched self pairs did not weaken performance with self-related stimuli, whereas reducing the frequency of either matched mother or stranger pairs hurt performance, relative to when the different match trials were equiprobable. In addition, while mother and stranger pairs jointly benefitted when they both occurred frequently, there were benefits only to self pairs when the frequency of self trials increased along with either mother or stranger trials. The results suggest that biases favoring self-related stimuli occur automatically, even when self-related stimuli have a low probability of occurrence, and that expectations to frequent, self-related stimuli operate in a relatively exclusive manner, minimizing biases to high-probability stimuli related to other people. In contrast, biases to high-familiarity stimuli (mother pairs) can be reduced when the items occur infrequently and they do not dominate expectations over other high-frequency stimuli.

Self-referential processing is distinct from semantic elaboration: evidence from long-term memory effects in a patient with amnesia and semantic impairments.

We report data demonstrating that self-referential encoding facilitates memory performance in the absence of effects of semantic elaboration in a severely amnesic patient also suffering semantic problems. In Part 1, the patient, GA, was trained to associate items with the self or a familiar other during the encoding phase of a memory task (self-ownership decisions in Experiment 1 and self-evaluation decisions in Experiment 2). Tests of memory showed a consistent self-reference advantage, relative to a condition where the reference was another person in both experiments. The pattern of the self-reference advantage was similar to that in healthy controls. In Part 2 we demonstrate that GA showed minimal effects of semantic elaboration on memory for items he semantically classified, compared with items subject to physical size decisions; in contrast, healthy controls demonstrated enhanced memory performance after semantic relative to physical encoding. The results indicate that self-referential encoding, not semantic elaboration, improves memory in amnesia. Self-referential processing may provide a unique scaffold to help improve learning in amnesic cases.

Attentional orientation induced by temporarily established self-referential cues.

Self-referential stimuli such as self-face surpass other-referential stimuli in capture of attention, which has been attributed to attractive perceptual features of self-referential stimuli. We investigated whether temporarily established self-referential stimuli are different from other-referential cues in guiding voluntary visual attention. Temporarily established self-referential or friend-referential shapes served as central cues in Posners endogenous cueing task. We found that, relative to friend-referential cues, self-referential cues induced smaller cueing effect (i.e., the difference in reaction times to targets at cued and uncued locations) when the interstimulus interval was short but larger cueing effect when the interstimulus interval was long. Our findings suggest that temporarily established self-referential cues are more efficient to capture reflexive attention at the early stage of perceptual processing and to shift voluntary attention at the later stage of perceptual processing.