Psychological Development and Education ›› 2011, Vol. 27 ›› Issue (5): 459-467.

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Neural Mechanism of Face Specific Recognition

LI Ming-fang1, ZHANG Ye2, JIA Lei2, LI Ting2, LI Wei-xia2, ZHANG Qing-lin2   

  1. 1. Key Research Institute of Humanities and Social Science of Ministry of Education, Center for Studies of Education and Psychology of Ethnic Minorities in Southwest, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715;
    2. Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality of Ministry of Education, School of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715
  • Online:2011-09-15 Published:2011-09-15

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Abstract: The present study employed the event-related brain potentials to record time courses when 16 normal young participants made consistency judgment to face/house stimuli with structural/partial changes.The aim is to reveal the nature of specificity of face recognition.The results showed N170 amplitude and latency had a significant main effect at stimulus type.Compared with the non-face stimuli,faces evoked a higher amplitude and shorter latency of N170;there wasn't a significant difference in processing at amplitude and latency of N170 component between face/non-face stimuli.Late components in the time window from 300-700 msec also had similar results. These results indicated the processing of faces and houses(non-face)were different in early and late components, reflecting the specificity of face recognition in early and late time windows.The late ERP components didn't support that the face processing was whole and structural and non-face object processing was local,part-based.

Key words: event-related potentials, face recognition, specificity, N170, hemispheric dominance

CLC Number: 

  • B844.3
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