The N170Adaptation Effect Of Expertise:Artificial Learning Of Greeble And Jiagu

Visual expertise is one of the most essential issues in the area of visual perception research. Although many advances have been made in the study of N170component which is an electrophysiological index for early visual expertise processing, the nature of expertise processing is not yet clear. Recently, many researchers began to use ERP fast adaptation paradigm to investigate that problem. The previous results have shown stable within-category N170adaptation effects for faces and words, as well as a cross-category N170adaptation effect between faces and words. While, here comes some questions:Do these N170adaptation effects exist in all visual objects processing, or does it only for expertise processing? And how does it develop? Moreover, previous studies have found familiarity was an important factor that impact the activation level of N170component, but whether it can modulate the N170adaptation effect was lack of research. Thus, to reveal these problems and with an artificial learning paradigm, the current study investigated the development of adaptation effects during artificial learning of greeble and Jiagu. The overall results are listed as follows:(1) Greebles evoked a significant within-category N170adaptation effect after expertise training, which didn’t appear before. Jiagu always evoked a within-category effect. These results indicate that within-category N170adaptation effect may be a specific mechanism for expertise objects processing.(2) Faces could produce cross-category N170adaptation effects to greebles, Jiagu and modern Chinese characters, which couldn’t produce such an effect to faces in turn. This asymmetrical cross-category N170adaptation effect suggest that faces expertise processing may includes some unique mechanism as compared with other expertised object processing. (3) The within-category N170adaptation effect for Jiagu enhanced a lot after form learning, and the cross-category N170adaptation effect between Jiagu and Chinese characters was nonexistent but emerged after learning. This indicated the familiarity of expertise objects can modulate the N170adaptation effect.