College of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Fudan University, Shanghai, China.
School of Psychology and Cognitive Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China.
Perception. 2020 Jun;49(6):658-671. doi: 10.1177/0301006620929197.
It is debated whether perceptual expertise of nonface objects, such as visual words, is indicated by holistic processing, which is regarded as a marker of perceptual expertise of faces. We address this question by frequency-tagged electroencephalography. Different parts of real or pseudo Chinese characters are presented at distinctive frequencies (6 or 7.2 Hz), which induce frequency-tagged steady-state visual-evoked potentials at occipital brain areas. The intermodulation response (e.g., 6 + 7.2 = 13.2 Hz) would emerge when holistic integration takes place. Our results suggest that the intermodulation response to the real characters is left lateralized, which is contralateral to previous findings with faces. Furthermore, at the left occipital area, the intermodulation response to real characters is more prominent than pseudo characters, suggesting that holistic integration is enhanced for real characters than for pseudo ones. Taken together, our findings suggest that holistic integration is potentially a general expertise marker for both faces and non-face objects.
对于非面部物体（如视觉单词）的感知专长是否表现为整体加工，人们对此存在争议，整体加工被认为是面部感知专长的一个标志。我们通过频率标记脑电图来解决这个问题。真或假汉字的不同部分以不同的频率（6 或 7.2 Hz）呈现，这会在枕叶大脑区域引发频率标记的稳态视觉诱发电位。当发生整体整合时，会出现中频调制响应（例如，6 + 7.2 = 13.2 Hz）。我们的结果表明，真字符的中频调制响应是左侧偏侧的，与之前关于面孔的发现相反。此外，在左枕叶区域，真字符的中频调制响应比假字符更为突出，这表明整体加工对于真字符比对假字符更为增强。总的来说，我们的研究结果表明，整体加工可能是面孔和非面部物体的通用专长标志。
