Physical self-similarity enhances the gaze-cueing effect

Important social information can be gathered from the direction of another person's gaze, such as their intentions and aspects of the environment that are relevant to those intentions. Previous work has examined the effect of gaze on attention through the gaze-cueing effect: an enhancement of performance in detecting targets that appear where another person is looking. The present study investigated whether the physical self-similarity of a face could increase its impact on attention. Self-similarity was manipulated by morphing participants' faces with those of strangers. The effect of gaze direction on target detection was strongest for faces morphed with the participant's face. The results support previous work suggesting that self-similar faces are processed differently from dissimilar faces. The data also demonstrate that a face's similarity to one's own face influences the degree to which that face guides our attention in the environment.