Self-Advantage in the Online World.

In the current research, screen name was employed to explore the possible cognitive advantage for self-related online material. The results showed that one’s own screen name and real name were detected faster than famous names in both visual search and discrimination tasks. In comparison, there was no difference in visual search speed for the two kinds of self-related names. These findings extend self-advantage from the physical world to the virtual online environment and confirm its robustness. In addition, the present findings also suggest that familiarity might not be the determining factor for self-advantage.