Event-related potentials provide strong evidence for a face-specific process that peaks at about 170 ms following stimulus onset--the N170 effect. The N170 has been shown to be sensitive to adaptation, reflected in an amplitude reduction by repeated face presentation, which is usually considered to be driven by bottom-up processes. Here we investigated whether the N170 adaptation profile can be...

Faces are visual objects that hold special significance as the icons of other minds. Previous researchers using event-related potentials (ERPs) have found that faces are uniquely associated with an increased N170/vertex positive potential (VPP) and a more sustained frontal positivity. Here, we examined the processing of faces as objects vs. faces as cues to minds by contrasting images of faces ...

Working memory load reduces the late positive potential (LPP), consistent with the notion that functional activation of the DLPFC attenuates neural indices of sustained attention. Visual attention also modulates the LPP. In the present study, we sought to determine whether working memory load might exert its influence on ERPs by reducing fixations to arousing picture regions. We simultaneously ...

It was investigated how face inversion affects face-specific components of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) which are assumed to reflect the structural encoding and the recognition of faces. ERPs were recorded to upright and inverted photographs of familiar faces, unfamiliar faces, and houses. In Part I, participants had to detect infrequently presented targets (hands), in Part II, attenti...

BACKGROUND Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) and anorexia nervosa (AN) share the clinical symptom of disturbed body image, which may be a function of perceptual distortions. Previous studies suggest visual or visuospatial processing abnormalities may be contributory, but have been unable to discern whether these occur early or late in the visual processing stream. We used electroencephalography (E...

The main objectives of this study were to investigate the development of face perception in Japanese children, focusing on the changes in face processing strategies (holistic and/or configural vs. feature-based) that occur during childhood. To achieve this, we analyzed the face-related N170 component, evoked by upright face, inverted face, and eyes stimuli in 82 Japanese children aged between 8...

To explore face specificity in visual processing, we compared the role of task-associated strategies and expertise on the N170 event-related potential (ERP) component elicited by human faces with the ERPs elicited by cars, birds, items of furniture, and ape faces. In Experiment 1, participants performed a car monitoring task and an animacy decision task. In Experiment 2, participants monitored ...

How fast are visual stimuli categorized as faces by the human brain? Because of their high temporal resolution and the possibility to record simultaneously from the whole brain, electromagnetic scalp measurements should be the ideal method to clarify this issue. However, this question remains debated, with studies reporting face-sensitive responses varying from 50 ms to 200 ms following stimulu...

In three experiments, Dering et al. (2011) measured the amplitude and latency of the mean P1 and N170 in response to faces, cars, and butterflies, cropped or morphed. The N170 was sensitive to cropping but did not differentiate frontal views of faces and cars. Throughout, P1 amplitude was larger for faces than objects. The authors concluded that P1, not N170, is a reliable face-sensitive event....

Contrast-related signals from the eye region are known to be important for the processing of facial identity. Individuals with developmental prosopagnosia (DP) have severe face recognition problems, which may be linked to deficits in the perceptual processing of identity-related information from the eyes. We tested this hypothesis by measuring N170 components in DP participants and age-matched ...