This study aimed to investigate the influence of dispositional self-construal on selfrelated processing. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded for a participant's own and a famous person's name in a three-stimulus oddball task. The results showed greater P2 and P3 amplitudes induced by one's own than by a famous person's name in both independent and interdependent self-construal groups. However, no N2 amplitude differences were found between the partcipant's own name and a famous person's name in either group. Moreover, the strength of the P2 effect (own vs. famous person's name) was stronger in the independent than in the interdependent self-construal group, whereas the P3 effect was similar between these two groups. Thus, these findings might reflect fast modulation of self-related processing by dispositional self-construal.

A growing number of behavioral and neuroimaging studies have investigated the cognitive mechanisms and neural substrates underlying various forms of visual expertise such as face and word processing. However, it remains poorly understood whether and to what extent the acquisition of one form of expertise would be associated with that of another. The current study examined the relationship between music-reading expertise and face and Chinese character processing abilities. In a series of experiments, music experts and novices performed discrimination and recognition tasks of musical notations, faces, and words. Results consistently showed that musical experts responded more accurately to musical notations and faces, but not to words, than did musical novices. More intriguingly, the music expert’s age of training onset could well predict their face but not word processing performance: the earlier musical experts began musical notation reading, the better their face-processing performance. Taken together, our findings provide preliminary and converging evidence that music-reading expertise links with face, but not word, processing, and lend support to the notion that the development of different types of visual expertise may not be independent, but rather interact with each other during their acquisition.