The early visual event-related 'N170 response' is sensitive to human body configuration and it is enhanced to nude versus clothed bodies. We tested whether the N170 response as well as later EPN and P3/LPP responses to nude bodies reflect the effect of increased arousal elicited by these stimuli, or top-down allocation of object-based attention to the nude bodies. Participants saw pictures of c...

As nonnegative tensor factorization (NTF) is particularly useful for the problem of underdetermined linear transform model, we performed NTF on the EEG data recorded from 14 electrodes to extract the multi-domain feature of N170 which is a visual event-related potential (ERP), as well as 5 typical electrodes in occipital-temporal sites for N170 and in frontal-central sites for vertex positive p...

Indeed, a recent ERP study compared the N170 amplitude to faces and words in two different presentation conditions: blocks that alternated faces and words as well as homogeneous blocks in which only one stimulus category was presented. Thirty-six different items of each category were presented. Results suggested that the face-elicited N170 is larger when face stimuli alternated with word stimul...

Enhanced threat processing has been associated with elevated anxiety in adults, but less is known about how threat processing influences the developmental trajectory of anxiety in children. We used the N170 to measure threat (angry faces) processing in relation to child anxiety over a 2-year period. Participants were 27 typically developing 5-to-7-year-olds (13 females). Higher anxiety when chi...

To investigate which stages in the structural encoding of faces are reflected by the face-specific N170 component, ERPs (event-related brain potentials) were recorded in response to different types of face and non-face stimuli. The N170 was strongly attenuated for cheek and back views of faces relative to front and profile views, demonstrating that it is not merely triggered by head detection. ...

Abstract The literature has mixed reports on whether the N170, an early visual ERP response to words, signifies orthographic and/or phonological processing, and these effects are moderated by script language expertise. In this study, native Chinese readers, Japanese–Chinese, Korean–Chinese bilingual readers performed a one-back repetition detection task with single characters that differed in r...

The N170 event-related potential component is larger to faces than to other objects but also varies in amplitude between non-face objects. This study investigated the hypotheses that these differences are related to the perceived face-likeness of the objects. Event-related potentials were recorded from 18 participants who classified objects as 'face like' or 'non-face like'. Images of actual fa...

Individuals with developmental prosopagnosia (DP) show severe face recognition deficits in the absence of any history of neurological damage. To examine the time-course of face processing in DP, we measured the face-sensitive N170 component of the event-related brain potential (ERP) in a group of 16 participants with DP and 16 age-matched control participants. Reliable enhancements of N170 ampl...

Human beings are natural experts at processing faces, with some notable exceptions. Same-race faces are better recognized than other-race faces: the so-called other-race effect (ORE). Inverting faces impairs recognition more than for any other inverted visual object: the so-called face inversion effect (FIE). Interestingly, the FIE is stronger for same- compared to other-race faces. At the elec...

Recognition of both faces and Chinese characters is commonly believed to rely on configural information. While faces typically exhibit behavioral and N170 inversion effects that differ from non-face stimuli (Rossion, Joyce, Cottrell, & Tarr, 2003), the current study examined whether a similar reliance on configural processing may result in similar inversion effects for faces and Chinese charact...