The Processing Advantage Of Self-face For The Aging

Self-face was special in visual processing. It owns the priority during visual processing, which was called self-face advantage. This advantage is caused by the role of configural and internal featural salient representations for self-face. The aged have low efficiency and age-related processing strategic in visual searching. Whether the self-face advantage is still intact and whether there is age-related change of the characteristics for its advantage remained unknown.The present study explored age-related changeable characteristics of self-face advantage during visual searching across adulthood from the aspects of configural salience, internal featual salience and the processing epochs.In the experiment 1, the search paradigm was used to investigate the age-related changes of self-face advantage related to configural salience and internal featual salience in the adult. The result showed the aged faster found upright self-face than upright unfamiliar other-face significantly, but there was no significant difference between inverted self-face and inverted unfamiliar other face. However, self-face was faster found than unfamiliar other face under both upright and inverted conditions. It suggested the aged owned the configual salience of self-face and lost internal featural salience of selfface while the young owned the both saliences of self-face.In the experiment 2, we further explored whether the self-face advantage was special and stable through altering the head orientation and using the familiar face as the count balance face. The result showed the old still found self-face more rapidly than familiar one. What is more, the change of face orientation did not affect self-face advantage in the old. However, the young did not find the own profile significant faster than other’s profile. It suggested the self-face advantage was caused by its special configual information in the aged and caused by its special configual information and featual information in the young.In experiment 3 eye-tracking was used to explore the different performance of two separate behavior epochs: search and response epochs. The result showed the aged found the upright self-face faster than inverted self-face, but there was no significant difference between upright and inverted other face in search epoch. The upright face was found faster than inverted one for both self-face and other-face in response epoch in the aged. Upright face was found more rapidly than inverted face under both self-face and other-face conditions in two epochs in the young. The results were the same as the experiment 1 and the experiment 2.In general, we found in the aged, the self-face was still special for its configural information which attract attention guided the visual search, however the self-face lost its featual salience. The self-face owns the configural salience and featual salience in the young. It provided the evidence that self-face advantage was still intact in the aged but the characteristics of it was changing according to the age-related change of cognition.