September 2021
Volume 21, Issue 9
Open Access
Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting Abstract  |   September 2021
Event-related brain potentials reveal robust face identity learning after a brief real-life encounter
Author Affiliations
  • Tsvetomila Popova
    Durham University
  • Holger Wiese
    Durham University
Journal of Vision September 2021, Vol.21, 1899. doi:https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.21.9.1899
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      Tsvetomila Popova, Holger Wiese; Event-related brain potentials reveal robust face identity learning after a brief real-life encounter. Journal of Vision 2021;21(9):1899. https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.21.9.1899.

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      © ARVO (1962-2015); The Authors (2016-present)

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Abstract

Previous studies have demonstrated that pre-experimentally unfamiliar faces elicit a familiarity effect in event-related brain potentials (ERP) following a lab-based learning task, with more negative amplitudes for learnt relative to unfamiliar faces in the N250 component. However, no study has tested this effect following a brief naturalistic exposure, and the temporal dynamics of face learning in ecologically more valid conditions have not been fully explored. The present study therefore used ERPs to investigate whether robust image-independent representations could be detected after a brief real-life encounter. In Experiment 1, the participants interacted with an unfamiliar, ‘to-be-learnt’ person for 30 min in a face-to-face conversation, directly followed by an EEG session in which they were shown highly variable “ambient” images of the newly learnt person and an unfamiliar face. ERPs revealed more negative amplitudes for the newly learnt identity at occipito-temporal channels in a 200-300 ms time window (N250) reflecting visual recognition. In Experiment 2, the learning time was reduced to 10 min in an attempt to establish the minimum exposure that still results in robust image representations. The N250 familiarity effect was again observed, which suggests that a 10 min social encounter is sufficient for image-independent representations to be established. We conclude that the first ten minutes of a social encounter are crucial for the generation of facial representations, and that the addition of twenty extra minutes from the same encounter does not provide a further learning benefit. At the same time, the effects found in these two experiments were small relative to those observed in previous studies investigating familiar face recognition. This suggests that the newly formed representations in the present study had not reached the same degree of image independence as those of more highly familiar faces.

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