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Free keywords:
face/agent compatibility, own-face, familiarity, joint action, self-reference
Abstract:
Two experiments studied the impact of irrelevant background faces on Go responses to imperative signals superimposed on them. Two major results were obtained. The first concerns a response time advantage of one's own face and a related advantage of familiar over unfamiliar faces. When the imperative signal was superimposed on the responding agent's own face, or the face of a sibling or friend, Go responses were faster as compared to unfamiliar faces. The second concerns the impact of social context. A slight increase of the own-face advantage was observed when the task was performed together with a co-actor. Importantly, this increase was only observed for unfamiliar, not familiar co-actors. The implications of these results are discussed in a framework for stimulus-based response selection which relies on two factors, face familiarity and face/agent compatibility.
