Jove
Visualize
Contact Us
JoVE
x logofacebook logolinkedin logoyoutube logo
ABOUT JoVE
OverviewLeadershipBlogJoVE Help Center
AUTHORS
Publishing ProcessEditorial BoardScope & PoliciesPeer ReviewFAQSubmit
LIBRARIANS
TestimonialsSubscriptionsAccessResourcesLibrary Advisory BoardFAQ
RESEARCH
JoVE JournalMethods CollectionsJoVE Encyclopedia of ExperimentsArchive
EDUCATION
JoVE CoreJoVE BusinessJoVE Science EducationJoVE Lab ManualFaculty Resource CenterFaculty Site
Terms & Conditions of Use
Privacy Policy
Policies

Related Experiment Videos

Controlling for interstimulus perceptual variance abolishes N170 face selectivity.

Guillaume Thierry1, Clara D Martin, Paul Downing

  • 1School of Psychology, Brigantia Building, Penrallt Road, University of Wales, Bangor, LL57 2AS, UK. g.thierry@bangor.ac.uk

Nature Neuroscience
|March 6, 2007
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Related Concept Videos

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by
Same author

Turning a blind eye: The struggle to inhibit attention towards unexpected negative emotions.

Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience·2026
Same author

Parallel processing of distinct facial signals for the rapid evaluation of social agents.

iScience·2026
Same author

Speech onset time at home or in the lab: The role of testing environment and experimenter presence.

Behavior research methods·2026
Same author

Affective Modulation of Cross-Language Activation is Domain General.

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences·2025
Same author

Are you talking to me? How the choice of speech register impacts listeners' hierarchical encoding of speech.

Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.)·2025
Same author

Foreign cultural norms are better accepted in the second language.

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences·2025

The N170 brainwave is not specific to faces but is affected by perceptual variance. Category effects in visual processing occur earlier than previously thought.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Visual Perception

Background:

  • Understanding visual cognition requires knowing when the brain differentiates object categories.
  • Event-related potential (ERP) studies suggest faces elicit a specific N170 wave around 170 ms.
  • Previous studies had uncontrolled interstimulus perceptual variance (ISPV).

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the N170's sensitivity to object category versus ISPV.
  • To identify the timing of early category-specific effects in visual processing.
  • To re-evaluate the face selectivity of the N170.

Main Methods:

  • Compared ERPs for faces, cars, and butterflies.
  • Controlled for interstimulus perceptual variance (ISPV) by using low and high variance conditions.
  • Analyzed ERPs for category and ISPV effects.

Related Experiment Videos

Main Results:

  • The N170 wave was sensitive to ISPV, not object category.
  • Category effects, independent of ISPV, were observed 70 ms earlier than previously reported.
  • This challenges the established face selectivity of the N170.

Conclusions:

  • The N170 is not exclusively face-selective; ISPV is a critical factor.
  • Early category effects in visual ERPs occur sooner than commonly believed.
  • Future ERP research must control for ISPV in multitrial averaging.