CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 130Face Recognition and PerceptionCultural Differences and ValuesSocial and Intergroup Psychology

Cultural difference in neural mechanisms of self-recognition

Open access
Sui, Jie, Liu, Chang Hong, Han, Shihui·2009·Social Neuroscience
DOI 10.1080/17470910802674825PMC PMC3348608
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Self-construals are different between Western and East Asian cultures in that the Western self emphasizes self-focused attention more, whereas the East Asian self stresses the fundamental social connections between people more. To investigate whether such cultural difference in self-related processing extends to face recognition, we recorded event-related potentials from British and Chinese subjects while they judged head orientations of their own face or a familiar face in visual displays. For the British, the own-face induced faster responses and a larger negative activity at 280-340 ms over the frontal-central area (N2) relative to the familiar face. In contrast, the Chinese showed weakened self-advantage in behavioral responses and reduced anterior N2 amplitude to the own-face compared with the familiar face. Our findings suggest that enhanced social salience of one's own face results in different neurocognitive processes of self-recognition in Western and Chinese cultures.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1080/17470910802674825

Cites

32 of 32 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • The N2 ERP response is reliably stronger for the self-face than for the faces of one's colleagues among British participants.

    “As may be expected, this N2 response has been shown to be reliably stronger for the self-face than for the faces of one's colleagues among the British participants.”

    From Cultural neuroscience of the self: understanding the social grounding of the brain (2010) · cites this paper as Sui et al., 2009

    The ERP Results report a significantly larger anterior N2 response to the own-face than to a familiar face among British participants (p=0.04). The Methods identify the familiar person as a gender-matched schoolmate known for 2–4 years, not a colleague; that comparator detail is unsupported. (LLM, conf=0.86)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

  • Cultural effects on early neural processing of socially significant stimuli are strong.

    “Initial neural evidence is indicative of strong cultural effects on such processing (Park et al., 2009;Sui et al., 2009;Ishii et al., in press).”

    From Cultural neuroscience of the self: understanding the social grounding of the brain (2010) · cites this paper as Sui et al., 2009

  • The self-face advantage in N2 response is attenuated among Chinese participants.

    “Importantly, this self-face advantage in N2 response was attenuated among Chinese participants (Sui et al., 2009).”

    From Cultural neuroscience of the self: understanding the social grounding of the brain (2010) · cites this paper as Sui et al., 2009

  • Self-other face recognition has been shown to be different across cultures.

    “self-other face recognition has been shown to be different across cultures (Liew et al., 2011; Sui et al., 2009).”

    From The free-energy self: a predictive coding account of self-recognition (2014) · cites this paper as Sui et al., 2009

  • Westerners show a greater self-bias on self-other face recognition tasks than East Asian individuals.

    “Indeed, Westerners show a greater self-bias on such tasks than East Asian individuals.”

    From The free-energy self: a predictive coding account of self-recognition (2014) · cites this paper as Sui et al., 2009

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Sui, J., Liu, C. H., & Han, S.
Affiliations
  • University of Hull (GB)
  • Peking University (CN)
Corresponding author
  • Sui, Jie
  • Han, Shihui
ORCID
Venue
Social Neuroscience
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
Published
2009-10
Volume
4
Issue
5
Pages
402-411
ISSN
  • 1747-0919 (ISSN-L)
  • 1747-0927
DOI
10.1080/17470910802674825
PMC
PMC3348608
OpenAlex
W2010653025
Cited by
130
References
32
Citations by year
2026: 5 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 4 · 2022: 9 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 5 · 2019: 9 · 2018: 3 · 2017: 10 · 2016: 3 · 2015: 22 · 2014: 3 · 2013: 14 · 2012: 11
FWCI
3.87
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Social Neuroscience (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
  • PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
Funders
Wellcome Trust (WT080851MA, 080851)
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Face Recognition and Perception
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Cultural Differences and Values
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Social and Intergroup Psychology
Keywords
self-recognition, face recognition (cognition), cultural differences, self-construal, N2 component, event-related potentials, social salience, self-focus
MeSH terms
Adolescent, Adult, Analysis of Variance, Brain Mapping, Cerebral Cortex, China, Cross-Cultural Comparison, Electroencephalography, England, Evoked Potentials, Visual, Face, Female, Humans, Male, Pattern Recognition, Visual, Photic Stimulation, Psychomotor Performance, Reaction Time, Self Concept, Statistics as Topic, Time Factors, Recognition, Psychology, Young Adult

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review