The associative processes involved in faces-proper names versus animals-common names binding: a comparative ERP study

Recognizing people involves creating and retrieving links between distinct representations such as faces and names. In previous research we have shown that the retrieval of face/name associations produced cerebral activities lateralized in the left hemisphere and spreading from posterior to anterior sites after about 300ms. The present ERP study was performed to compare the specific electrophysiological activities elicited by the retrieval of face/proper name (FP) and animal/common name (AC) associations. Using a subtraction method to isolate the specific binding activities, we showed that both kinds of association produced two main posterior negative/anterior positive complexes, with a more frontal distribution for AC, and bilateral temporal activities. These findings confirm that general associative processes - independent of the kind of association - are not simply the sum of the activities elicited by each stimulus, and that they could involve both unimodal sensory and multimodal convergence regions of the brain.