The N250 event-related potential as an index of face familiarity: a replication study

Werner Sommer; Katarzyna Stapor; Grzegorz Kończak; Krzysztof Kotowski; Piotr Fabian; Jeremi Ochab; Anna Bereś; Grażyna Ślusarczyk

doi:10.1098/rsos.202356

The N250 event-related potential as an index of face familiarity: a replication study

R Soc Open Sci. 2021 Jun 2;8(6):202356. doi: 10.1098/rsos.202356.

Authors

Werner Sommer¹, Katarzyna Stapor², Grzegorz Kończak³, Krzysztof Kotowski², Piotr Fabian⁴, Jeremi Ochab⁵, Anna Bereś⁶, Grażyna Ślusarczyk⁷

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychology, Humboldt-University at Berlin, Rudower Chaussee 18, 12489 Berlin, Germany.
² Department of Applied Informatics, Silesian University of Technology, Gliwice, Poland.
³ Department of Statistics, Econometrics and Mathematics, University of Economics in Katowice, Poland.
⁴ Department of Algorithmics and Software, Silesian University of Technology, Gliwice, Poland.
⁵ Department of Theory of Complex Systems, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland.
⁶ Department of Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroergonomics, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland.
⁷ Department of Design and Computer Graphics, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland.

Abstract

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.

Keywords: EEG; ERP; N250; face familiarity; face learning.