Attentional Bias for Self-Face: Investigation using Drift Diffusion Modelling

Literature has suggested that self-faces are processed differently at various stages of information processing. Although mechanisms like familiarity, implicit positive attitude, emotional arousal, dual-coding, and dopamine reward pathway have been theorized to explain this effect, it may share a fundamental basis in the attentional mechanism resulting in perceptual prioritization for self-face. In this study, we have assessed the attentional bias resulting from the self-face (over other familiar and unfamiliar faces), by using face pairs as cues before a dot-probe task. We looked at reaction time and its underlying latent variables as a function of face pairs used as cues. We find that both self-face and familiar face result in a faster reaction time for subsequent stimuli at cued locations. Though self-face shows this advantage for both short and long cue-time, a familiar face shows the advantage only for longer cue-time. We also found that drift rate bias is found for the location where self-face is presented. Familiar faces show a prior bias (z) as the reason for underlying advantage. We conclude that although, self-face, as well as familiar faces, might bias the processing of subsequent stimuli the underlying latent factor might differ