Abstract
The neural correlates of face individuation—the acquisition of memory representations for novel faces—have been studied only in coarse detail and disregarding individual differences between learners. In their seminal study, Tanaka et al. (Tanaka et al. 2006 J. Cogn. Neurosci. 18, 1488–1497. (doi:10.1162/jocn.2006.18.9.1488)) required the identification of a particular novel face across 70 trials and found that the N250 component in the EEG event-related potentials became more negative from the first to the second half of the experiment, where it reached a similar amplitude as a well-known face. We were unable to directly replicate this finding in our study when we used the original split of trials. However, when we applied a different split of trials we observed very similar changes in N250 amplitude. We conclude that the N250 component is indeed sensitive to the build-up of a robust representation of a face in memory; the time course of this process appears to vary as a function of variables that may be determined in future research.
Highlights
The recognition of the faces of individual persons is crucial for social life
The N170 is larger to faces than to most other objects and increases in amplitude and latency when the structure of a face is hard to perceive; it has rarely been found to be sensitive to individual faces or to face familiarity [5,6,7]
The average accuracy of responses for the 18 participants that completed the whole experiment was high (M = 91.45%, s.d. = 11.47%) with significantly higher values in the second half of the experiment (M = 95.66%, s.d. = 5.76%) than in the first half (M = 87.25%, s.d. = 18.99%) according to the Wilcoxon signed-ranked test (Z = 3.03, p = 0.002)
Summary
The recognition of the faces of individual persons is crucial for social life. it is often very easy to recognize familiar faces, it is much harder for unfamiliar faces [1] especially from single instances [2]. Other studies showed that the N250 component itself increases when unfamiliar faces are presented repeatedly [6] and that similar effects hold when experts view non-face objects in their domain of expertise [10]. When the responses to ‘Joe’ presentations were averaged separately for the first half and the second half of the experiment (35 trials each), the N250 amplitude within a region of interest (ROI) of 12 electrodes at posterior areas of the scalp in the time range 230–320 ms post-stimulus was larger (more negative) in the second than in the first half of the experiment and became indistinguishable from the N250 to the highly familiar picture of the participant’s own face. We attempted to replicate the results of the seminal study of Tanaka et al [6]
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