The N250 event-related potential as an index of face familiarity: a replication study.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Sommer W
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8170192 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Similar Datasets
Project description:The event-related potential (ERP) is the brain response measured in electroencephalography (EEG), which reflects the process of human cognitive activity. ERP has been introduced into brain computer interfaces (BCIs) to communicate the computer with the subject's intention. Due to the low signal-to-noise ratio of EEG, most ERP studies are based on grand-averaging over many trials. Recently single-trial ERP detection attracts more attention, which enables real time processing tasks as rapid face identification. All the targets needed to be retrieved may appear only once, and there is no knowledge of target label for averaging. More interestingly, how the features contribute temporally and spatially to single-trial ERP detection has not been fully investigated. In this paper, we propose to implement a local-learning-based (LLB) feature extraction method to investigate the importance of spatial-temporal components of ERP in a task of rapid face identification using single-trial detection. Comparing to previous methods, LLB method preserves the nonlinear structure of EEG signal distribution, and analyze the importance of original spatial-temporal components via optimization in feature space. As a data-driven methods, the weighting of the spatial-temporal component does not depend on the ERP detection method. The importance weights are optimized by making the targets more different from non-targets in feature space, and regularization penalty is introduced in optimization for sparse weights. This spatial-temporal feature extraction method is evaluated on the EEG data of 15 participants in performing a face identification task using rapid serial visual presentation paradigm. Comparing with other methods, the proposed spatial-temporal analysis method uses sparser (only 10% of the total) features, and could achieve comparable performance (98%) of single-trial ERP detection as the whole features across different detection methods. The interesting finding is that the N250 is the earliest temporal component that contributes to single-trial ERP detection in face identification. And the importance of N250 components is more laterally distributed toward the left hemisphere. We show that using only the left N250 component over-performs the right N250 in the face identification task using single-trial ERP detection. The finding is also important in building a fast and efficient (fewer electrodes) BCI system for rapid face identification.
| S-EPMC5711855 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The tendency of customers' preference to their local brands over the foreign ones is known as consumer ethnocentrism, and it is an important issue in international marketing. This study aims at identifying the behavioral and neural correlates of Consumer Ethnocentrism in the field of brand preference, using event-related potential (ERP). We sampled subjects from two ethnic groups, a Chinese ethnic group and a sub-Saharan Black African group from Zhejiang University. The subjects faced two sequential stimuli, S1 followed by S2. S1 consisted of 40 pictures of 20 Chinese and 20 Black Africans people wearing traditional clothes, and S2 consisted of 40 fake brand-logos which were divided randomly into two groups of 20 each. The subjects were informed that the people in S1 purchased and recommended the products with the brand-logos presented in S2, and the subjects were asked to rate their preference degree toward these logos. The brand-logos were called the "in-group recommended logos" if the recommenders in S1 were the same race as the subjects, otherwise, the "out-group recommended logos." The results revealed that the race of the brand-logo recommender highly impacted the Chinese subjects' preference for the brand-logos. The N200 component elicited by the in-group recommended logos were significantly lower than those elicited by the out-group recommended logos. Additionally, there was evidence that being familiar with foreign cultures reduced consumer ethnocentrism. The African subjects were familiar with Chinese people and adopted a Chinese culture, as a result, they did not differ in showing preferences between the in-group and out-group recommended logos.
| S-EPMC6620706 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Background:Parkinson's disease is associated with impaired ability to recognize emotional facial expressions. In addition to a visual processing disorder, a visual recognition disorder may be involved in these patients. Pareidolia is a type of complex visual illusion that permits the interpretation of a vague stimulus as something known to the observer. Parkinson's patients experience pareidolic illusions. N170 and N250 waveforms are two event-related potentials (ERPs) involved in emotional facial expression recognition. Objective:In this study, we investigated how Parkinson's patients process face and face-pareidolia stimuli at the neural level using N170, vertex positive potential (VPP), and N250 components of event-related potentials. Methods:To examine the response of face and face-pareidolia processing in Parkinson's patients, we measured the N170, VPP, and N250 components of the event-related brain potentials in a group of 21 participants with Parkinson's disease and 26 control participants. Results:We found that the latencies of N170 and VPP responses to both face and face-pareidolia stimuli were increased along with their amplitudes, and the amplitude of N250 responses decreased in Parkinson's patients compared to the control group. In both control and Parkinson's patients, face stimuli generated greater ERP amplitude and shorter latency in responses than did face-pareidolia stimuli. Conclusion:The results of our study showed that ERPs associated with face and also face-pareidolia stimuli processing are changed in early-stage neurophysiological activity in the temporoparietal cortex of Parkinson's patients.
| S-EPMC7150676 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Recognition of personally familiar faces is remarkably efficient, effortless and robust. We asked if feature-based face processing facilitates detection of familiar faces by testing the effect of face inversion on a visual search task for familiar and unfamiliar faces. Because face inversion disrupts configural and holistic face processing, we hypothesized that inversion would diminish the familiarity advantage to the extent that it is mediated by such processing. Subjects detected personally familiar and stranger target faces in arrays of two, four, or six face images. Subjects showed significant facilitation of personally familiar face detection for both upright and inverted faces. The effect of familiarity on target absent trials, which involved only rejection of unfamiliar face distractors, suggests that familiarity facilitates rejection of unfamiliar distractors as well as detection of familiar targets. The preserved familiarity effect for inverted faces suggests that facilitation of face detection afforded by familiarity reflects mostly feature-based processes.
| S-EPMC5459439 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Humans experience more stress about uncertain situations than certain situations. However, the neural mechanism underlying the uncertainty of a negative stimulus has not been determined. In the present study, event-related potential was recorded to examine neural responses during the dread of unpredictable pain. We used a cueing paradigm in which predictable cues were always followed by electric shocks, unpredictable cues by electric shocks at a 50/50 ratio and safe cues by no electric shock. Visual analogue scales following electric shocks were presented to quantify subjective anxiety levels. The behavioral results showed that unpredictable cues evoked high-level anxiety compared with predictable cues in both painful and unpainful stimulation conditions. More importantly, the ERPs results revealed that unpredictable cues elicited a larger P200 at parietal sites than predictable cues. In addition, unpredictable cues evoked larger P200 compared with safe cues at frontal electrodes and compared with predictable cues at parietal electrodes. In addition, larger P3b and LPP were observed during perception of safe cues compared with predictable cues at frontal and central electrodes. The similar P3b effect was also revealed in the left sites. The present study underlined that the uncertain dread of pain was associated with threat appraisal process in pain system. These findings on early event-related potentials were significant for a neural marker and development of therapeutic interventions.
| S-EPMC5568389 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Animation creates a vivid, virtual world and expands the scope of human imagination. In this study, we investigated the time-courses of brain responses related to the evaluation of the attractiveness of cartoon faces using the event-related potential (ERP) technique. The results demonstrated that N170 amplitude was higher for attractive than for unattractive cartoon faces in males, while the opposite was found in females. Facial attractiveness notably modulated the late positive component (LPC), which might reflect the task-related process of aesthetic appraisal of beauty. The mean LPC amplitude in males was significantly higher for attractive cartoon faces than for unattractive faces, while the LPC amplitude in females did not significantly differ between attractive and unattractive cartoon faces. Moreover, the paint mode (computer graphics, gouache, and stick figure) modulated the early encoding of facial structures and the late evaluative process. The early modulation effect by paint mode may be related to the spatial frequency of the pictures. The processing speed and intensity in females were both higher than those in males. In conclusion, our study, for the first time, reported ERP modulation based on the assessment of cartoon facial attractiveness, suggesting the facilitated selection of attractiveness information at the early stage, and that the attentional enhancement of attractive faces at the late stage only exists in males. This suggests that men's brains are hard-wired to be sensitive to facial beauty, even in cartoons.
| S-EPMC5562603 | biostudies-other
Project description:Recent research has examined the extent to which face and voice processing are associated by virtue of the fact that both tap into a common person perception system. However, existing findings do not yet fully clarify the role of familiarity in this association. Given this, two experiments are presented that examine face-voice correlations for unfamiliar stimuli (Experiment 1) and for familiar stimuli (Experiment 2). With care being taken to use tasks that avoid floor and ceiling effects and that use realistic speech-based voice clips, the results suggested a significant positive but small-sized correlation between face and voice processing when recognizing unfamiliar individuals. In contrast, the correlation when matching familiar individuals was significant and positive, but much larger. The results supported the existing literature suggesting that face and voice processing are aligned as constituents of an overarching person perception system. However, the difference in magnitude of their association here reinforced the view that familiar and unfamiliar stimuli are processed in different ways. This likely reflects the importance of a pre-existing mental representation and cross-talk within the neural architectures when processing familiar faces and voices, and yet the reliance on more superficial stimulus-based and modality-specific analysis when processing unfamiliar faces and voices.
| S-EPMC10887171 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Studies suggest that familiar faces are processed in a manner distinct from unfamiliar faces and that familiarity with a face confers an advantage in identity recognition. Our visual system seems to capitalize on experience to build stable face representations that are impervious to variation in retinal input that may occur due to changes in lighting, viewpoint, viewing distance, eye movements, etc. Emerging evidence also suggests that our visual system maintains a continuous perception of a face's identity from one moment to the next despite the retinal input variations through serial dependence. This study investigates whether interactions occur between face familiarity and serial dependence. In two experiments, participants used a continuous scale to rate attractiveness of unfamiliar and familiar faces (either experimentally learned or famous) presented in rapid sequences. Both experiments revealed robust inter-trial effects in which attractiveness ratings for a given face depended on the preceding face's attractiveness. This inter-trial attractiveness effect was most pronounced for unfamiliar faces. Indeed, when participants were familiar with a given face, attractiveness ratings showed significantly less serial dependence. These results represent the first evidence that familiar faces can resist the temporal integration seen in sequential dependencies and highlight the importance of familiarity to visual cognition.
| S-EPMC5383812 | biostudies-literature
Project description:A face-selective neural signal is reliably found in humans with functional MRI and event-related potential (ERP) measures, which provide complementary information about the spatial and temporal properties of the neural response. However, because most neuroimaging studies so far have studied ERP and fMRI face-selective markers separately, the relationship between them is still unknown. Here we simultaneously recorded fMRI and ERP responses to faces and chairs to examine the correlations across subjects between the magnitudes of fMRI and ERP face-selectivity measures. Findings show that the face-selective responses in the temporal lobe (i.e., fusiform gyrus--FFA) and superior temporal sulcus (fSTS), but not the face-selective response in the occipital cortex (OFA), were highly correlated with the face-selective N170 component. In contrast, the OFA was correlated with earlier ERPs at about 110 ms after stimulus-onset. Importantly, these correlations reveal a temporal dissociation between the face-selective area in the occipital lobe and face-selective areas in the temporal lobe. Despite the very different time-scale of the fMRI and EEG signals, our data show that a correlation analysis across subjects may be informative with respect to the latency in which different brain regions process information.
| S-EPMC6870976 | biostudies-literature
Project description:How we compute time is not fully understood. Questions include whether an automatic brain mechanism is engaged in temporally regular environmental structure in order to anticipate events, and whether this can be dissociated from task-related processes, including response preparation, selection and execution. To investigate these issues, a passive temporal oddball task requiring neither time-based motor response nor explicit decision was specifically designed and delivered to participants during high-density, event-related potentials recording. Participants were presented with pairs of audiovisual stimuli (S1 and S2) interspersed with an Inter-Stimulus Interval (ISI) that was manipulated according to an oddball probabilistic distribution. In the standard condition (70% of trials), the ISI lasted 1,500 ms, while in the two alternative, deviant conditions (15% each), it lasted 2,500 and 3,000 ms. The passive over-exposition to the standard ISI drove participants to automatically and progressively create an implicit temporal expectation of S2 onset, reflected by the time course of the Contingent Negative Variation response, which always peaked in correspondence to the point of S2 maximum expectation and afterwards inverted in polarity towards the baseline. Brain source analysis of S1- and ISI-related ERP activity revealed activation of sensorial cortical areas and the supplementary motor area (SMA), respectively. In particular, since the SMA time course synchronised with standard ISI, we suggest that this area is the major cortical generator of the temporal CNV reflecting an automatic, action-independent mechanism underlying temporal expectancy.
| S-EPMC3641105 | biostudies-literature