The role of the eye region for neural correlates of familiar face recognition: The N250r reveals no evidence for eye-centred face representations

Abstract

Humans recognize familiar faces highly accurately. However, it is unclear precisely what information is stored in the underlying long-term face representations. While some have emphaszsed the importance of the eye region, other evidence has shown that faces are processed as integrated wholes. We examined the role of the eye region in activating familiar face representations using the N250r, an event-related potential correlate of repetition priming. We presented blur chimeras, i.e., spatially low-pass filtered faces with unfiltered eye regions, and observed a clear N250r which was absent for fully blurred faces (Experiments 1 and 2). However, we observed a similar N250r for chimeras with unfiltered eye or mouth regions (Experiment 3), indicating that the effect is not exclusive to the eyes. We conclude that the efficient activation of face representations is not specifically facilitated by detailed information from the eye region, and that face representations are not centred around the eyes.