The recovery speed of category sensitive N170 responses to faces and Chinese characters

Neural selectivity of N170 responses is important for understanding face, word, and object processing in the brain. However, the recovery times of neural selective responses remain unclear. In the present study, we used an adaptation paradigm to test the recovery speed of N170 responses to faces and Chinese characters. The findings revealed that recovery of N170 responses elicited by faces occurred between 1400 and 1800 ms after stimulus onset, whereas those elicited by Chinese characters occurred between 600 and 800 ms. These results demonstrate that N170 responses involved in the processing of faces and Chinese characters exhibit category sensitive recovery speeds.