It is well-documented that both emotion-label words (e.g., sadness, happiness) and emotion-laden words (e.g., death, wedding) can induce emotion activation. However, the neural correlates of emotion-label words and emotion-laden words recognition have not been examined. The present study aimed to compare the underlying neural responses when processing the two kinds of words by employing event-r...

Higher N170 amplitudes to words and to faces were recently reported for faster readers of German. Since the shallow German orthography allows phonological recoding of single letters, the reported speed advantages might have their origin in especially well-developed visual processing skills of faster readers. In contrast to German, adult readers of Hebrew are forced to process letter chunks up t...

Schizophrenia patients show impairments in identifying facial affect; however, it is not known at what stage facial affect processing is impaired. We evaluated 3 event-related potentials (ERPs) to explore stages of facial affect processing in schizophrenia patients. Twenty-six schizophrenia patients and 27 normal controls participated. In separate blocks, subjects identified the gender of a fac...

This study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the effects of age on neural temporal dynamics of processing task-relevant facial expressions and their relationship to cognitive functions. Negative (sad, afraid, angry, and disgusted), positive (happy), and neutral faces were presented to 30 older and 31 young participants who performed a facial emotion categorization task. Behavi...

Previous event-related potential (ERP) studies have shown that the N170 to faces is modulated by the emotion of the face and its context. However, it is unclear how the encoding of emotional target faces as reflected in the N170 is modulated by the preceding contextual facial expression when temporal onset and identity of target faces are unpredictable. In addition, no study as yet has investig...

To understand visual cognition, it is imperative to determine when, how and with what information the human brain categorizes the visual input. Visual categorization consistently involves at least an early and a late stage: the occipito-temporal N170 event related potential related to stimulus encoding and the parietal P300 involved in perceptual decisions. Here we sought to understand how the ...

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a non-invasive brain stimulation technique that can modulate cortical excitability. Although the clinical value of tDCS has been advocated, the potential of tDCS in cognitive rehabilitation of face processing deficits is less understood. Face processing has been associated with the occipito-temporal cortex (OT). The present study investigated wh...

OBJECTIVES An event-related brain potential (ERP) study investigated how different processing stages involved in face identification are reflected by ERP modulations, and how stimulus repetitions and attentional set influence such effects. METHODS ERPs were recorded in response to photographs of familiar faces, unfamiliar faces, and houses. In Part I, participants had to detect infrequently p...

The human face is the most studied object category in visual neuroscience. In a quest for markers of face processing, event-related potential (ERP) studies have debated whether two peaks of activity - P1 and N170 - are category-selective. Whilst most studies have used photographs of unaltered images of faces, others have used cropped faces in an attempt to reduce the influence of features surro...

Several lines of experimental evidence support an association between facial processing and social cognition, but no direct link between cortical markers of facial processing and complex cognitive processes has been reported until now. In the current study, we tested the hypothesis that cortical electrophysiological markers for the processing of facial emotion are associated with individual dif...