Cognitive advantage for self-related information has been well established in a number of studies using various stimuli. However, there is much debate about the effect of familiarity in this advantage. Given this, the current paper aimed to review previous findings in this field. In research on self-reference effect, the effect of familiarity is usually examined by comparing memory performance between self-referential processing and other-referential processing tasks. Participants usually demonstrate better memory for material processed in reference to self than those processed in reference to famous person. Nonetheless, when the control condition involves intimate persons, such as parents, partner, or close friends, the magnitude of self advantage is greatly reduced. Significant cultural difference has been confirmed in these studies with Westerners showing self advantage over even intimate persons and Western participants showing no difference in self/intimate person-referential processing. There are also findings that stimuli type may interact with reference target to influence memory performance. Studies with face stimuli have showed that own face is detected faster than others’ face, including familiar faces, even under unattended conditions. When used as distracters, it is more difficult to ignore and show stronger interfering power on target stimuli. In fact, own face is not necessarily more familiar than others’ face as one has more opportunity to see other’s face. As a result, the superior performance demonstrated by own face provide a convincing evidence that familiarity might not be the determining factor for self advantage. Following Moray (1959)’s famous study, cocktail party effect has been replicated in many studies. Surprisingly, however, little research has been done to address the issue of familiarity. The very few studies which have employed familiar names as control stimuli actually focused on the neural basis of self name recognition and still yielded inconsistent results. Taken together, the available evidence does not support the argument that self advantage results just from its inherent familiarity. However, a distinction between material familiarity and task familiarity proposed based on these above findings and real-life experience should be noted. The former means exposure experience to specific stimuli while the latter familiarity refers to whether participants have much experience of processing stimuli in some specific ways. The two kinds of familiarity is dissociable in that participants may be more familiar with one kind of stimuli related to him/herself than others but have no more experience of processing it in some specific way, and vice versa. For example, one usually has more experience to search for others’ face than own face despite its high familiarity. It was argued that future research may need to pay more attention to the effect of task familiarity.