This project examined changes in cognitive biases (based on the self, and friends) using a perceptual matching task along with self-report measures of personal distance in young and older adults. Participants first learned associations between neutral geometrical shapes (e.g., triangle, circle, and square) and personal labels (You, Friend, Stranger) representing participants, their named best friend, and a stranger not corresponding to anyone they knew, and they then carried out a simple shape-label matching task where they judged whether shape-label stimuli matched. Participants also reported the perceived personal distance between themselves, their best friend, and a stranger. We demonstrate that compared to young participants, older adults showed an increased bias toward matching their friends over strangers, whereas the bias toward the self over friends tended to decrease in the perceptual matching task. Equivalent results occurred for a perceived personal distance and on measures of perceptual sensitivity with older adults; the personal distance between friends and strangers correlated with the friend bias in matching. These results indicate that the social bias to a familiar best friend increases with age and modulates perceptual matching.We take a particular interest in things that belong to us; we remember them better and we pay them more attention when they appear in the environment. How this ‘self prioritisation’ comes about remains poorly understood however. The aim of this project is to use a new procedure we have developed in order to understand how ‘self prioritisation’ affects basic perceptual processes. In our new procedure we can ‘tag’ a geometric shape with self relevance and we can then study how basic perceptual processing for that shape changes when compared with other matched shapes. In the project we will conduct a series of experiments that examine whether ‘self prioritisation’ affects spatial and temporal attention to stimuli. The research will provide a first-ever analysis of the effects of a ‘social’ variable (the self) on difference stages of perception.

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