Information associated with the self is preferentially processed compared to others. However, cultural differences appear to exist in the way information is processed about those close to us like our mothers. In eastern compared to western cultures, information about mother seems to be processed as well as our self. However, it is not clear whether this lack of difference is due to familiarity or would extend to processing arbitrary perceptual information associated with different categorical labels. The current study employs a perceptual association paradigm in which category labels like self, mother and none are associated with arbitrary shapes to study self vs mother processing in an Indian sample. We hypothesized that there would be no difference between self and mother processing given the familial and collectivistic tendencies in India. Participants performed a matching task between shape and a pre-assigned category label, with self, mother, and none as categories in Experiment 1A and self, friend, and none as categories in Experiment 1B. Analysis of RT, accuracies and signal detection theoretic measures showed that information about mother is processed as well as self in Experiment 1A, but this effect is not present with friend in Experiment 1B. Moreover, participants’ processing for the self-associated information gets attenuated depending upon the other close person category used in the task (friend vs mother) indicating that self-information processing is dynamically dependent on the categorical contexts in which such processing takes place. Our findings have implications for understanding the processing of self-associated information across cultures and contexts.

与他人相关的信息优先被处理。然而，在处理与我们亲近的人（如我们的母亲）的信息的方式上似乎存在文化差异。在东方与西方文化相比，关于母亲的信息似乎和我们的自我一样被处理。然而，尚不清楚这种缺乏差异是由于熟悉还是会扩展到处理与不同分类标签相关的任意感知信息。当前的研究采用感知关联范式，其中自我、母亲和无等类别标签与任意形状相关联，以研究印度样本中的自我与母亲处理。鉴于印度的家庭和集体主义倾向，我们假设自我处理和母亲处理之间没有区别。参与者在形状和预先分配的类别标签之间执行匹配任务，实验 1A 中的类别为 self、mother 和 none，实验 1B 中的类别为 self、friend 和 none。RT、准确度和信号检测理论措施的分析表明，在实验1A中，母亲的信息和自己一样被处理，但这种影响在实验1B中不存在于朋友身上。此外，参与者对自我相关信息的处理根据任务中使用的其他亲密人物类别（朋友与母亲）而减弱，这表明自我信息处理动态依赖于发生此类处理的分类上下文。我们的发现对理解跨文化和背景的自我关联信息的处理具有重要意义。