Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charité University Medicine, Campus Benjamin Franklin, Berlin, Germany.
Int J Psychophysiol. 2013 Feb;87(2):183-8. doi: 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2012.12.007. Epub 2012 Dec 30.
Several studies employed the repetition suppression paradigm to investigate the face-specific N170 component of the event-related potential (ERP), but yielded highly inconsistent results. Varying inter-stimulus intervals (ISIs) may account for inconsistencies between studies. This study aimed at exploring the time course of repetition suppression by systematically investigating the association between ISI and ERP adaptation. Fourteen healthy subjects were investigated with a passive face recognition paradigm using paired stimuli. Stimuli were presented for 500ms and ISIs parametrically varied between 400 and 2000ms. N170 was constructed to investigate adaptation effects on the level of perceptual face processing. We found an evidence for an asymptotic decay of repetition suppression over time with significant N170 adaptation effects only after the shortest ISI. Our results robustly demonstrate that N170 adaptation in a paired stimulus protocol critically depends on short ISIs, thereby explaining the inconsistencies observed in the previous studies. For future social cognition studies using neuronal adaptation to face stimuli, the current results provide a well defined ISI associated with a large N170 adaptation effect.
几项研究采用重复抑制范式来研究事件相关电位（ERP）中的特定面孔的 N170 成分，但得到的结果高度不一致。刺激间间隔（ISI）的变化可能是造成研究之间不一致的原因。本研究旨在通过系统研究 ISI 与 ERP 适应之间的关系，来探索重复抑制的时程。14 名健康受试者参与了使用成对刺激的被动面孔识别范式。刺激呈现 500ms，ISI 以 400 到 2000ms 的参数变化。构建 N170 来研究适应对感知面孔加工水平的影响。我们发现，随着时间的推移，重复抑制呈渐近衰减，只有在最短的 ISI 后才会出现显著的 N170 适应效应。我们的结果有力地证明，在成对刺激协议中，N170 的适应强烈依赖于短的 ISI，从而解释了先前研究中观察到的不一致性。对于未来使用神经元适应对面部刺激的社会认知研究，当前的结果提供了一个与大的 N170 适应效应相关的明确的 ISI。
