“…1.1 | The influence of prior social knowledge on early perceptual stages of face processing Prior knowledge and experiences have been repeatedly shown to modulate very early (even less than 100 ms after stimulus onset) neural responses (Abdel Rahman & Sommer, 2008;Bao et al, 2010;Bar et al, 2006;Chaumon et al, 2008Chaumon et al, , 2009Gamond et al, 2011;Pourtois et al, 2008). Specifically in the social domain, familiarity and personal relevance have previously been observed to exert an important influence on visual processing of faces (Ramon & Gobbini, 2018), for example, dramatically facilitating recognition (Natu & O'Toole, 2011) and enhancing early neural processing (e.g., increased P1 amplitudes in Bayer et al, 2021). Crucially, discrimination of facial identity, which requires prior social and semantic knowledge, has been reported to occur very early (even as early as 70 ms after stimulus onset; Nemrodov et al, 2016), especially for familiar (as compared to unfamiliar) faces (Dobs et al, 2019).…”