Schweinberger, S. R. 1, 2
1 DFG Research Unit Person Perception
2 Department of General Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany
I will present part of a 20-year research programme in which my colleagues and I have used cognitive (e.g., Bruce & Young, 1986) and computational (e.g., Burton et al., 1990) models as frameworks for the study of neurophysiological correlates of face recognition. Here, face recognition has been conceived as a complex facility that requires the orchestrated activity of multiple neurocognitive subroutines (cf. the contributions in Schweinberger, S.R. & Burton, A.M., Eds., 2011. Person Perception 25 years after Bruce and Young (1986). Special Issue, British Journal of Psychology, 102(4), 2011). I will argue that a substantial part of electrophysiological research has seen a strong focus on the N170, at the expense of other face-sensitive ERP components including those that were shown to relate more specifically to individual face recognition. I will briefly discuss evidence for multiple face-sensitive components suggesting that (a) the N170 is related to face detection and structural encoding, but not recognition, (b) the occipitotemporal P2 is sensitive to second-order spatial configuration, and possibly indexes processes related to unfamiliar face learning and population expertise, (c) the posterior temporal N250r is highly sensitive to face familiarity and can index individual face recognition, and (d) a centroparietal N400 systematically relates to domain-independent access of semantic information about people. I will argue that because other aspects of face perception (e.g., perception of gender, age, eye gaze, emotional expression etc.) also depend on multiple neurocognitive subroutines, further progress in electrophysiological research necessitates appreciating the variety of ERP components that relate to different functional components of face perception.