Elsevier

NeuroImage

Volume 36, Issue 2, June 2007, Pages 464-471
NeuroImage

The FN400 indexes familiarity-based recognition of faces

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2006.12.016Get rights and content

Abstract

Separate event-related brain potential (ERP) components have been hypothesized to index familiarity and recollection processes that support recognition memory. A 300- to 500-ms mid-frontal FN400 old/new difference has been related to familiarity, whereas a 500- to 800-ms parietal old/new difference has been related to recollection. Other recent work has cast doubt on the FN400 familiarity hypothesis, especially its application to familiarity-based recognition of conceptually impoverished stimuli such as novel faces. Here we show that FN400 old/new differences can be observed with novel faces, and as predicted by the familiarity hypothesis, these differences are observed regardless of whether or not recognition is accompanied by the recollection of specific details from the study episode. Furthermore, FN400 differentiation between hits and misses is more consistent with an explicit familiarity process than an implicit memory process.

Section snippets

Participants

Thirty-three right-handed students at the University of Colorado participated in the experiment for payment of $15 per hour. All participants gave informed consent. Data from nine participants were discarded because of excessive eye-movement artifacts (n = 2), low trial counts (less than 20 trials/condition, n = 4), low accuracy (n = 1) or an excessive number of bad channels (n = 2). Of the remaining 24 subjects included in the analyses (mean age = 21 years; range = 18–27 years), 14 were female.

Stimuli

Stimuli

Results

Yovel and Paller’s (2004) primary analyses focused on correct rejections, familiar hits (“no specific details”), and hits associated with recollection of the correct occupation. They reported that ERPs were similar for correct rejection and misses but did not formally report misses. We include misses here because they are potentially relevant for differentiating processes related to familiarity vs. priming, which is particularly relevant to the FN400 interpretation.1

Discussion

As predicted by the hypothesis that 300- to 500-ms mid-frontal FN400 old/new effects are related to familiarity, we found that the FN400 did not differ according to subject’s ability to recollect occupations that had been previously associated with correctly recognized faces. Critically, FN400 old/new differences were significant even when responses were presumably familiarity-based (i.e., “no details”), despite a previous report that familiar faces are not differentiated from new faces until a

Conclusions

Faces associated with correct rejection or misses showed a significantly more negative FN400 (300–500 ms) than faces that were correctly recognized as old, regardless of whether or not subjects could also recollect the associated occupation from the study episode. This result is consistent with the hypothesis that the FN400 is related to familiarity, and that the underlying mechanism applies to novel faces as well as to other previously examined stimuli such as words, identifiable pictures and

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by NIMH Grant R01-MH64812 and a University of Colorado Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship. The experiment was part of Jane Hancock’s Senior Honors Thesis, and we would like to thank the other thesis committee members: Mark Whisman and Claudia Van Gerven. We also thank Brion Woroch and Casey DeBuse for programming and research assistance, and Nicole Speer and Erika Nyhus for helpful comments. Portions of the research in this paper use the Color FERET database of

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