Familiar and nonfamiliar face-specific ERP components

Our purpose was to study the face familiarity effects on the ERP components during the explicit and implicit face recognition and encoding. Healthy volunteers performed both face-comparison and pattern-comparison tasks during the same experiment. Two cues switched their attention between the tasks, while the two consecutive stimuli contained both faces (familiar and nonfamiliar faces in separate series) and patterns superimposed. It seems that the face familiarity influences multiple sites in ERPs. In addition to differences on latencies later than 300 ms in frontal and occipitoparietal areas, we found differences in the 180-280 ms interval (frontocentral and posterior temporal areas), and even earlier, in 80-170 ms. The differences in 340-600 ms were highly reduced when attention was not directed to faces. The differences in 180-280 ms were present; however, they were observed in smaller areas. The locations for differences in 80-170 ms were task-specific.