Abstract
The process when we get to know a person makes his/her initially unfamiliar face familiar and alters its cortical representation. Recently, it has been shown that familiar and unfamiliar faces elicit differential steady-state visual evoked potentials (ssVEP) over the occipital-temporal region (OT). Here, we used a personal familiarisation paradigm, to evaluate how originally unfamiliar faces become familiar. Participants (n = 22) were personally familiarized with two female target identities in the course of three consecutive days (minimum 30 minutes of real-life contact over playing a card-game and discussions in a natural environment each day). We recorded the EEG to measure the ssVEPs in a Fast Periodic Visual Stimulation paradigm for the faces of the target persons and two unfamiliar foil identities (presented with a rate of 0.85 Hz) among unfamiliar female faces (presentation rate - 6 Hz) before and after this familiarization phase. The ssVEP showed an enhanced amplitude to the familiarized faces, when compared to the unfamiliar ones after familiarization over OT regions. Our results indicate that a brief personal familiarization phase is sufficient to alter facial representations and that the ssVEP is sensitive enough to detect these changes.