Later but not early stages of familiar face recognition depend strongly on attentional resources: Evidence from event-related brain potentials

In everyday life we usually recognise personally familiar faces efficiently and without apparent effort. This study examined to which extent the neural processes involved in recognising personally familiar faces depend on attentional resources by analysing event-related brain potentials. In two experiments, participants were presented with multiple ambient images of highly personally familiar and unfamiliar faces and pictures of butterflies, with a letter string superimposed on each image. Their task was either to indicate when a butterfly occurred (effectively ignoring the letter strings) or to indicate whether each letter string contained the letter X or N. Attentional resource load was manipulated in the letter task by presenting the target among different distractor letters (high load; Experiment 1) or by using only a single repeated letter in each string (low load; Experiment 2). ERPs revealed more negative amplitudes for familiar relative to unfamiliar faces under both high and low load conditions, both in the N250, reflecting the activation of perceptual face representations, and in the subsequent Sustained Familiarity Effect (SFE). Nonetheless, while the magnitude of the N250 effect was not substantially affected by attentional load, the SFE was still present but reduced in the high relative to the low load experiment. These findings suggest that perceptual face representations are activated independent of the demands of a competing task. However, the subsequent SFE, presumably reflecting more sustained activation needed to access identity-specific knowledge that can guide potential interactions, strongly relies on the availability of attentional resources.