Human electrophysiological studies have found that the processing of faces and other objects differs reliably at approximately 150 ms after stimulus onset, faces giving rise to a larger occipitotemporal field potential on the scalp, termed the N170. We hypothesize that visual expertise with nonface objects leads to the recruitment of early face-related categorization processes in the occipitote...

We examined the effect of linguistic comprehension on early perceptual encoding in a series of electrophysiological and behavioral studies on humans. Using the fact that pictures of faces elicit a robust and reliable evoked response that peaks at ∼170 ms after stimulus onset (N170), we measured the N170 to faces that were preceded by primes that referred to either faces or scenes. When the prim...

Change blindness refers to the inability to detect visual changes if introduced together with an eye-movement, blink, flash of light, or with distracting stimuli. Evidence of implicit detection of changed visual features during change blindness has been reported in a number of studies using both behavioral and neurophysiological measurements. However, it is not known whether implicit detection ...

We assessed the specificity to human faces of the N170 ERP component in the context of natural scenes. Subjects categorized photographs containing human faces, animal faces and various objects. Spatiotemporal topography analyses were performed on the individual ERP data. ERPs elicited by animal faces were similar to human faces ERPs but with a delayed face activity. In the N170 time window, ERP...

Unlike most other objects that are processed analytically, faces are processed configurally. This configural processing is reflected early in visual processing following face inversion and contrast reversal, as an increase in the N170 amplitude, a scalp-recorded event-related potential. Here, we show that these face-specific effects are mediated by the eye region. That is, they occurred only wh...

We examined the relation between neural activity reflecting early face perception processes and automatic and controlled responses to race. Participants completed a sequential evaluative priming task, in which two-tone images of Black faces, White faces, and cars appeared as primes, followed by target words categorized as pleasant or unpleasant, while encephalography was recorded. Half of these...

Face recognition is known to be impaired when the contrast polarity of the eyes is inverted. We studied how contrast affects early perceptual face processing by measuring the face-sensitive N170 component to face images when the contrast of the eyes and of the rest of the face was independently manipulated. Fixation was either located on the eye region or on the lower part of a face. Contrast-r...

Faces are perhaps the most important object category in visual perception, as faces of conspecifics frequently convey behaviourally, socially, and emotionally relevant information that is critical for the adaptive control of action. Given this undisputed significance of faces, it is not surprising that the study of human face processing has long been one of the most active research areas in vis...

The left-lateralized N170 component of ERPs for words compared with various control stimuli is considered as an electrophysiological manifestation of visual expertise for written words. To understand the information sensitivity of the effect, researchers distinguish between coarse tuning for words (the N170 amplitude difference between words and symbol strings) and fine tuning for words (the N1...

The present study had two aims. The first aim was to explore the possible top-down effect of face-recognition and/or face-identification processes on the formation of structural representation of faces, as indexed by the N170 ERP component. The second aim was to examine possible ERP manifestations of face identification processes as an initial step for assessing their time course and functional...