Memory systems for structural and semantic knowledge of faces and buildings

It is an ongoing debate whether specific neurocognitive systems are involved in face and object recognition, particularly for analyses that require the access to stored structural and semantic knowledge. Here we compared the processing of familiar (at the exemplar level) and unfamiliar faces and buildings by recording event-related potentials in a repetition priming paradigm. We focused on the early repetition effect (ERE/N250r) which has been proposed to indicate the access to stored structural knowledge and the late repetition effect (LRE/N400), a possible indicator of semantic knowledge. An ERE/N250r was present for familiar buildings and smaller than for faces, but indistinguishable in terms of scalp topography. In contrast, the LRE/N400 was stimulus specific in topography. These findings suggest initial access to a common store of structural knowledge followed by the activation of category-specific cortical representations of person- and building-related semantic knowledge.