The Role Of Familiarity In Cognitive Advantage For One’s Own Name

Compared with other information, self-related information (their own face, their own name) has certain advantages in cognitive processing. The cognitive advantage for self-related information has been well examined in a number of researches using different tasks such as self-referential processing and face recognition. Studies with name stimuli have showed that participant’s own name is detected faster than other’s name, including familiar names, famous names. Besides, when their own name used as distracters, subjects need spend more time to recognize target stimuli, because of it’s difficult for them to ignore their own name.In research on cognitive advantage of self-related information, many researches had studied the effect of familiarity on the cognitive advantage of self-related information. For example, in research on self-reference effect, the effect of familiarity is usually explored by comparing memory performance between self-referential processing and other-referential processing tasks, including parents referential processing, friends referential processing and famous person referential processing. And in research on face recognition, familiar face also used to compare with their own face. But in research on name recognition, many researches usually directly use their full name to study the role of familiarity in cognitive advantage, due to this, four name recognition experiments were designed to explore the role of familiarity with the name-related stimulus.In Experimentl, a visual search task was employed where participants’first name, last name, famous person’s first name, last name served as target in four blocks respectively. Each block was consisted of120trials. In half of the block, the target name was present; in the other half of block, it was absent. An ANOVA analysis was conducted to test the response time. The results of Experiment1found that, participants’first name and last name were detected faster than famous person’s first name and last name. Besides, first name was also detected faster than last name.In Experiment2, participants’first name was split into two new words, last name was also split into two new words, and so did the famous person’s first name and last name, then split words were served as target in four blocks respectively. For example, name is Zhang chu(“张姝”),then zhang(张)was split into gong and chang(“弓长”),chu(姝)was split into nv and zhu(“女朱”).The results of Experiment2showed that, participants’split words of first name and last name were detected faster than famous person’s split words.Experiment3adopted visual stimulus that were part of first name and last name and has an independent significance. Then subjects were asked to judge if the visual stimuli was appeared. For example, name is Guo jing(’‘郭静”),then select word xiang(享)and qing(�')as visual stimulus. The results of Experiment3showed that, participants’part of first name and last name were detected faster than famous person’s part of first name and last name.Experiment4selected visual stimulus that were similar to the name of participants and famous people, then these similar words were served as target in four blocks. The results of Experiment4showed that, participants’similar words of first name and last name were detected faster than famous person’s similar words of first name and last name. To sum up, one’s own name-related information can be detected more quickly than famous name-related information in4visual search experiments. Based on these findings, it can be concluded that the familiarity is not the determining factor for cognitive advantage of name-related information.