ERP profiles for face and word recognition are based on their status in semantic memory not their stimulus category

Internal versus external features in triggering the brain waveforms for conjunction and feature faces in recognition

“…Dual-process models have proposed that two processes, familiarity and recollection, are involved in recognition memory [1][2][3][4]. The familiarity process is believed to underlie a general sense of the occurrence of an event or an item encountered before.…”

“…More event-related potential (ERP) studies on recognition have typically described canonical patterns of the waveform differences between recognized (old) and correctly rejected (new) items (such differences are called the old/new effect) that parallel the processes of familiarity and recollection [1,2,4,5]. Specifically, the early old/ new effect (also called the FN400), a negative component (more negative for new than old items) that appears around 400 ms after stimulus onset over the frontal scalp, is considered to reflect familiarity, whereas the late old/ new effect, a positive component (more positive for old than new items) that appears roughly 500-600 ms over the posterior scalp, is conceived to reflect recollection [3][4][5][6][7].…”

“…Specifically, the early old/ new effect (also called the FN400), a negative component (more negative for new than old items) that appears around 400 ms after stimulus onset over the frontal scalp, is considered to reflect familiarity, whereas the late old/ new effect, a positive component (more positive for old than new items) that appears roughly 500-600 ms over the posterior scalp, is conceived to reflect recollection [3][4][5][6][7]. However, several recent investigations have reported that the late old/new effects evoked by faces are maximal over the anterior scalp, whereas those by verbal stimuli are maximal over the posterior scalp, suggesting that the spatial distributions of these effects are categorically different [4,8,9].…”

Elements of person knowledge: Episodic recollection helps us to identify people but not to recognize their faces

“…The precise functional significance of the effect remains unclear: for example, recent evidence suggests the left parietal effect is sensitive not only to the amount of recollection present, but also to the quality of information retrieved (Murray et al, 2015). In addition, recollection for unfamiliar faces has been shown to exhibit a more anteriorly distributed effect – instead of the left parietal effect (MacKenzie and Donaldson, 2007, MacKenzie and Donaldson, 2009, Galli and Otten, 2011, Nie et al, 2014), leading to the hypothesis that recollection only elicits left parietal effects when information is associated with pre-existing long-term memory representations. From this perspective, the current findings suggest that recollection of familiar and unfamiliar faces may be supported by distinct neural mechanisms – a key question for future research.…”

“…However, this standard model is challenged on two fronts from claims that the midfrontal effect actually reflects conceptual priming (Voss et al, 2010) and that recollection for unfamiliar faces elicits an anterior effect (MacKenzie and Donaldson, 2007, MacKenzie and Donaldson, 2009, Galli and Otten, 2011). Importantly, the current investigation examines memory for famous faces, which have been shown to elicit the standard left parietal effect (Nie et al, 2014). In this context ERPs provide a robust means of measuring the contribution of episodic retrieval to performance.…”