| The priming effect refers to the promotion and facilitation of follow-up behaviors by people’s past experience.The face is a special kind of stimulus in life,and the mechanism of facial priming effect is often explained by the IAC model,which holds that the priming effect of familiar faces will be greater than that of unfamiliar faces.However,whether the internal or external features of faces have a greater influence on the priming effect has not been involved in previous studies.In addition,the neural mechanism of the influence of familiarity on the feature faces’ priming effect remains to be further explored.This research will study the facial priming effect with event-related potential(ERP)technology.By comparing the difference of the amplitudes of the ERP waveforms between the old faces,internal feature faces and external feature faces,it is to determine which part of the features has a greater influence upon the facial priming effect.According to previous studies,the ERP components related to facial priming effect mainly include P100,N170,N250r,and N400,in which the N250r and N400 are significantly regulated by lag length and familiarity.Therefore,this study will also focus on these components,as well as the effect of lag length on its regulation.This study consists of two experiments.Experiment 1 used unfamiliar faces to study the differences in the priming effect of internal features and external features at different lag length(immediate repetition and delayed repetition).The participants were asked to make gender judgments on the presented faces,and each face was presented twice.The first presented face was the primed item,and the re-presented one was the target item(the faces were divided into old faces,internal feature faces and external feature faces on the basis of the difference in the repetition feature of the primed item).The results showed that N250r was recorded on the condition of delayed repetition of old faces,and N400 was recorded under the condition of immediate repetition of old faces and delayed repetition of the internal feature faces.In experiment 2,famous faces were used as experimental materials and the research method was the same as experiment 1.The results showed that N250r were recorded under the condition of immediate repetition of old faces and external feature faces,and N400 were recorded under immediate repetition of all three types of faces.The main conclusions of this study are as follows:(1)The neural mechanism of facial priming effect is affected by familiarity,manifested as famous faces priming effect is greater than unfamiliar faces,supporting the IAC model.(2)The influence of the internal and external features of faces on priming effect is different and is regulated by familiarity.The internal features of unfamiliar faces have a greater influence at prime,while the external features of famous faces have a greater influence at prime.(3)The neural mechanism of facial priming effect is regulated by the lag length.and the priming effect under the immediate repetition is greater than the delayed repetition. |
