The N170 Shows Differential Repetition Effects for Faces, Objects, and Orthographic Stimuli

Tools

Mercure, Evelyne; Kadosh, Kathrin Cohen and Johnson, Mark H.. 2011. The N170 Shows Differential Repetition Effects for Faces, Objects, and Orthographic Stimuli. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 5, 6. ISSN 1662-5161 [Article]

Preview

Text
Mercure_Cohen-Kadosh.pdf - Published Version
Download (1MB) | Preview

Official URL: https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2011.00006

Abstract or Description

Previous event-related potentials research has suggested that the N170 component has a larger amplitude to faces and words than to other stimuli, but it remains unclear whether it indexes the same cognitive processes for faces and for words. The present study investigated how category-level repetition effects on the N170 differ across stimulus categories. Faces, cars, words, and non-words were presented in homogeneous (1 category) or mixed blocks (2 intermixed categories). We found a significant repetition effect of N170 amplitude for successively presented faces and cars (in homogeneous blocks), but not for words and unpronounceable consonant strings, suggesting that the N170 indexes different underlying cognitive processes for objects (including faces) and orthographic stimuli. The N170 amplitude was significantly smaller when multiple faces or multiple cars were presented in a row than when these stimuli were preceded by a stimulus of a different category. Moreover, the large N170 repetition effect for faces may be important to consider when comparing the relative N170 amplitude for different stimulus categories. Indeed, a larger N170 deflection for faces than for other stimulus categories was observed only when stimuli were preceded by a stimulus of a different category (in mixed blocks), suggesting that an enhanced N170 to faces may be more reliably observed when faces are presented within the context of some non-face stimuli.

Item Type:

Article

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2011.00006

Additional Information:

Copyright: © 2011 Mercure, Kadosh and Johnson. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and Frontiers Media SA, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.

Keywords:

adaptation, habituation, event-related potentials, face processing, objects, words

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Psychology

Dates: