Open AccessThe N250 event-related potential as an index of face familiarity: a replication study
Author(s) -
Werner Sommer,
Katarzyna Stąpor,
Grzegorz Kończak,
Krzysztof Kotowski,
Piotr Fabian,
Jeremi K. Ochab,
Anna Bereś,
Grażyna Ślusarczyk
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
royal society open science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.84
H-Index - 51
ISSN - 2054-5703
DOI - 10.1098/rsos.202356
Subject(s) - psychology , event related potential , replicate , event (particle physics) , face (sociological concept) , replication (statistics) , representation (politics) , computer science , cognitive psychology , neuroscience , pattern recognition (psychology) , artificial intelligence , electroencephalography , mathematics , physics , statistics , social science , quantum mechanics , sociology , politics , political science , law
The neural correlates of face individuation—the acquisition of memory representations for novel faces—have been studied only in coarse detail and disregarding individual differences between learners. In their seminal study, Tanaka et al . (Tanaka et al. 2006 J. Cogn. Neurosci. 18 , 1488–1497. ( doi:10.1162/jocn.2006.18.9.1488 )) required the identification of a particular novel face across 70 trials and found that the N250 component in the EEG event-related potentials became more negative from the first to the second half of the experiment, where it reached a similar amplitude as a well-known face. We were unable to directly replicate this finding in our study when we used the original split of trials. However, when we applied a different split of trials we observed very similar changes in N250 amplitude. We conclude that the N250 component is indeed sensitive to the build-up of a robust representation of a face in memory; the time course of this process appears to vary as a function of variables that may be determined in future research.