One's own name distorts visual space

Here, we demonstrated that one's own name attracts the subjective location of a visual target. We simultaneously presented observers their own name and others' name in the left and right visual fields. A target circle was presented for 53 ms around the center of the display 200 ms after the names disappeared. Ten observers were required to manually reproduce the target location by pointing with the mouse. The results indicated that the observers significantly mislocalized the target 1.61' on average toward the location of their own name. These observations indicated that the visual space is distorted by one's own name, which biases the spatial distribution of visual attention. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.