"No man is an island" but we live among other people. Each person in our social network has a unique relationship to us, depending on how well we know this person, how emotionally close we are to this person, or how often we encounter this person during everyday life. How are these relationships reflected in the patterns of brain activity?
In two separate studies, we found that names of close others (family, friends) evoked similar neural responses to those evoked by the participant's name. In contrast, the neural processing of celebrities' and strangers' names differed considerably from the processing of own name. Thus, psychological closeness-to-the-self might be represented in the brain as a degree of similarity between the neural representations of the self and a given other person.
Full text:
Tacikowski, P., Cygan, H. B., Nowicka, A. (2014). Neural correlates of own and close-other's name recognition: ERP evidence. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8:1-10. PDF
Tacikowski, P., Brechmann, A., Jednorog, K., Marchewka, A., Dobrowolny, M., Nowicka, A. (2011). Is it about the self or the significance? An fMRI study of self-name recognition. Social Neuroscience, 6:98-107. PDF
