Neural time course of processing socially meaningful symbolic cues: ERP differences between national-symbol and...

Socially meaningful symbolic cues are common in everyday visual environments, yet the timing with which they diverge from neutral objects during neural processing remains unclear. This study examined the temporal dynamics of one culturally meaningful class of symbolic cues, national-symbol icons, using event-related potentials (ERPs). Thirty-four Chinese university students completed a within-subject ERP task in which 30 national-symbol icons and 30 neutral-object icons were each presented twice. Participants indicated whether they would be willing to share each icon and then rated pleasantness, arousal, and patriotic feeling. Mean ERP amplitudes were analyzed in three predefined time windows: N1 (100-150 ms), N400-range negativity (250-400 ms), and late positive potential (LPP; 550-750 ms). National-symbol icons were associated with greater willingness to share and higher ratings of pleasantness, arousal, and patriotic feeling than neutral-object icons. At the neural level, national-symbol icons elicited a more negative N1 and a larger N400-range negativity. The LPP difference was not statistically significant, although national-symbol icons showed numerically greater positivity. Overall, national-symbol icons differed from neutral-object icons in more than one predefined ERP time window, with the clearest effect in the 250-400 ms interval. The findings are broadly consistent with enhanced mid-latency processing of socially shared meaning in one culturally meaningful class of symbolic cues, although this interpretation remains tentative because the present study provides condition-level behavioral convergence rather than definitive participant-level brain-behavior validation.