title: Electrophysiological correlates of face-evoked person knowledge.
abstract: Face recognition includes identifying a face as perceptually familiar and recollecting biographical information, or person-knowledge, associated with the face. The majority of studies examining the neural basis of face recognition have confounded these stages by comparing brain responses evoked by novel and perceptually familiar famous faces. Here, we recorded EEG in two tasks in which subjects viewed two sets of faces that were equally perceptually familiar, but which had differing levels of associated person-knowledge. Our results dissociated the effects of person-knowledge from perceptual familiarity. Faces with associated biographical information elicited a larger ∼600ms centroparietal positivity in both a passive viewing task in which subjects viewed faces without explicitly responding, and an active question-answering task in which subjects indicated whether or not they knew particular facts about the faces. In the question task only, person-knowledge was associated with a negative ERP difference over right posterior scalp over the 170-450ms interval which appeared again at long latency (>900ms).
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology Yale University, 2 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.
authors.forename: JohnMark
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Taylor
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology Yale University, 2 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.
authors.forename: Zarrar
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Shehzad
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology Yale University, 2 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven, CT 06520, USA,. Electronic address: gregory.mccarthy@yale.edu.
authors.forename: Gregory
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: McCarthy
mesh_terms: D004569:Electroencephalography; D005074:Evoked Potentials, Visual; D000066499:Facial Recognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology*; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Event-related potentials ERPs; Face perception; N170; N250; P600; Person knowledge