Article

To determine the time course of face recognition and its links to face-sensitive
event-related potential (ERP) components, ERPs elicited by faces of famous
individuals and ERPs to non-famous control faces were compared in a task that
required explicit judgements of facial identity. As expected, the face-selective
N170 component was unaffected by the difference between famous and non-famous
faces. In contrast, the occipito-temporal N250 component was linked to face
recognition, as it was selectively triggered by famous faces. Importantly, this
component was present for famous faces that were judged to be definitely known
relative to famous faces that just appeared familiar, demonstrating that it is
associated with the explicit identification of a particular face. The N250 is
likely to reflect early perceptual stages of face recognition where long-term
memory traces of familiar faces in ventral visual cortex are activated by
matching on-line face representations. Famous faces also triggered a broadly
distributed longer-latency positivity (P600f) that showed a left-hemisphere bias
and was larger for definitely known faces, suggesting links between this
component and name generation. These results show that successful face
recognition is predicted by ERP components over face-specific visual areas that
emerge within 230 ms after stimulus onset.
CI - Copyright (c) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Langue : ANGLAIS