Brain potentials reflect access to visual and emotional memories for faces.

Familiar faces convey different types of information, unlocking memories related to social-emotional significance. Here, the availability over time of different types of memory was evaluated using the time-course of P3 event related potentials. Two oddball paradigms were employed, both using unfamiliar faces as standards. The infrequent targets were, respectively, artificially-learned faces (devoid of social-emotional content) and faces of acquaintances. Although in both tasks targets were detected accurately, the corresponding time-course and scalp distribution of the P3 responses differed. Artificially-learned and acquaintance faces both elicited a P3b, maximal over centro-parietal sites, and a latency of 500ms. Faces of acquaintances elicited an additional component, an early P3 maximal over frontal sites: with a latency of 350ms. This suggests that visual familiarity can only trigger the overt recognition processes leading to the slower P3b, whereas emotional-social information can also elicit fast and automatic assessments (indexed by the frontal-P3) crucial for successful social interactions.