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Perceiving age and gender in unfamiliar faces: Brain potential evidence for implicit and explicit person categorization
Author(s) -
Wiese Holger,
Schweinberger Stefan R.,
Neumann Markus F.
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
psychophysiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.661
H-Index - 156
eISSN - 1469-8986
pISSN - 0048-5772
DOI - 10.1111/j.1469-8986.2008.00707.x
Subject(s) - categorization , psychology , priming (agriculture) , repetition priming , cognitive psychology , response priming , cognition , task (project management) , event related potential , lateralization of brain function , developmental psychology , lexical decision task , neuroscience , linguistics , philosophy , botany , germination , management , economics , biology
We used repetition priming to investigate implicit and explicit processes of unfamiliar face categorization. During prime and test phases, participants categorized unfamiliar faces according to either age or gender. Faces presented at test were either new or primed in a task‐congruent (same task during priming and test) or incongruent (different tasks) condition. During age categorization, reaction times revealed significant priming for both priming conditions, and event‐related potentials yielded an increased N170 over the left hemisphere as a result of priming. During gender categorization, congruent faces elicited priming and a latency decrease in the right N170. Accordingly, information about age is extracted irrespective of processing demands, and priming facilitates the extraction of feature information reflected in the left N170 effect. By contrast, priming of gender categorization may depend on whether the task at initial presentation requires configural processing.