Self salience across the age range

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We have recently demonstrated that our perception is enhanced for stimuli that are associated with ourselves relative to stimuli that are associated with other people. That is, stimuli associated to ourselves have increased 'self salience'. There is also evidence that our tendency to prioritize ourselves increases as we age, and this may contribute to other changes in social cognition in older individuals - an example being the ability to see the view of other people. In this project we will conduct a detailed analysis of whether ageing leads to increases in self saliency in perception, and whether such effects predict stronger self-prioritization in higher-level tasks such as face recognition, memory and seeing the viewpoint of other people. In Part 1 of the project we will test whether the self-bias in perception is increased in older people, whether there are changes in particular perceptual processes, and how these changes in behaviour relate to changes in brain activity. Part 2 will evaluate two potential factors that might lead to alterations in self-bias - the reward and the emotional value of self-related information. Are age-related changes due to older adults showing stronger effects of reward and/or stronger effects of emotion on perception? In Part 3 we will assess if age-related changes in self salience in perception predict changes in higher-level tasks (face recognition, memory, seeing others' viewpoints). In addition, by testing brain lesioned patients with reduced self-bias in perception, we will evaluate if perceptual biases are required in order to generate self-prioritization effects in higher-level tasks. The project will provide a fine-grained analysis of whether and how self-related processing changes as we age.