The spatiotemporal characteristics of N170s for faces and words: A meta‐analysis study

Abstract N170 is a negative event‐related potential (ERP) component in response to visual stimuli, such as faces. It remains controversial whether N170 reflects the specific processing of faces or can also be elicited by objects of expertise (e.g., words). In this research, we conducted a meta‐analysis for the spatiotemporal characteristics of N170 of face and word stimuli from 24 studies in which both stimuli were presented for each subject. We observed that (1) both face and word stimuli can elicit conspicuous N170s and that there was no difference between the amplitude of face‐N170 and word‐N170; (2) there is no difference in the latencies between the two N170s; and (3) both N170s are distributed in the occipitotemporal regions but with a reversed hemispheric distribution pattern—face‐N170 is more negative in the right than left occipitotemporal regions, while word‐N170 is the opposite. These results showed that the face‐ and word‐N170s are qualitatively the same but have different hemispheric lateralization advantages—N170 might be a general neural index of the expertise‐dependent object‐recognition process in occipitotemporal regions.