Cross-modal facilitation is not specific to self-face recognition

Abstract

. Cross-modal self recognition: The role of visual, auditory, and olfactory primes. Consciousness and Cognition, in press Recently, Platek, Thomson and Gallup (2004) reported a series of three experiments that were aimed at determining how information about the self from different modalities and domains affects self-face recognition. Their results indicated that being exposed to one's own body odour, and seeing or hearing one's own name all facilitated the recognition of one's own face. No cross-modal facilitation was found for other familiar persons and for unfamiliar individuals. These authors claimed that this pattern of results suggests that the perceptions of self in the olfactory, auditory, and visual domains are not mutually exclusive but rather interact and provide for integrative processing of self-information. They concluded that "these priming effects on processing information about the self strongly suggest that rather than being modality specific/dependent, the sense of self is represented by a larger multi-modal phenomenon".In their paper, Platek et al. present cross-modal facilitation of face recognition as if this phenomenon was specific to self-face recognition. This interpretation is consistent with their own results that showed no priming of other (familiar or unfamiliar) individuals' faces from their respective odour, spoken name or written name. However, cross-modal facilitation of familiar face recognition, in general, was predicted by current Interactive Activation and Competition (IAC) models of face recognition (Brédart,

Self-specific priming effect

“…Although Platek, Thomson, and Gallup's interpretation is consistent with their own results (showing no cross-modal priming for nonself individuals), it contrasts with previously reported evidence of cross-modal priming for non-self faces (Calder & Young, 1996). An alternative account, proposed by Brédart (2004), reconciles these seemingly discrepant findings by introducing the notion of cross-modal priming as a graded phenomenon, whose existence is not exclusive to self face recognition, but whose magnitude is greater for self face recognition (compared to other faces'). In Brédart's view, Platek's et al (2004) failure to detect cross-modal facilitation for non-self faces, in conditions that yielded cross-modal facilitation for self faces, reflects this difference in priming strength, rather than self-specificity.…”

Asymmetries of the human social brain in the visual, auditory and chemical modalities

“…in empathy, imitation, communication), gives an idea of how much the functions of the nervous system are adapted to the interactive nature of human sociality. The study of single-and multi-modal cues to social perception has revealed that there are strong reciprocal influences between auditory, visual and chemical inputs (Kovács et al 2004;Platek et al 2004;Campanella & Belin 2007), and in this review we have attempted to summarize the current knowledge on their neural bases, with a focus on hemispheric asymmetries.…”

“…These cues are principally conveyed by the visual, auditory and olfactory modalities. Moreover, there is ample evidence that visual, auditory and olfactory cues interact cross modally, forming integrated person perceptions (Kovács et al 2004;Platek et al 2004;Campanella & Belin 2007). Touch could be listed as another source of social information, but despite its non-irrelevant involvement in social perception and interaction, it has received comparatively less attention (but see Bufalari et al (2007) and Dunbar (in press) for recent theoretical and empirical work).…”

The free-energy self: A predictive coding account of self-recognition

“…Traditionally, self-recognition is measured using self-other detection tasks, self-other morphing tasks, (where participants stop a video morph between self and other when it looks more like “me”), or masked priming tasks where reaction times are compared between self and other related primes (Bredart, 2004; Devue and Bredart, 2008; Devue et al, 2009; Frassinetti et al, 2008; Heinisch et al, 2011; Keenan et al, 2000; Keenan et al, 1999; Kircher et al, 2001; Pannese and Hirsch, 2010, 2011; Rotshtein et al, 2005; Tsakiris, 2008). All of these methods converge on the notion of a self-bias, with self-stimuli being more salient and processed faster.…”