4. Discussion
The main aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship
between the N250 component and face recognition performance on the
individual differences level by applying the paradigm of Tanaka et al.
(2006), where participants had to identify a single target face among
several non-target faces. We tested this relationship separately for
target faces and non-target faces, while distinguishing – within
non-target faces – between high and low distinctive faces. For target
faces, we replicated the increase of N250 amplitude across the first and
second half of the experiment, but did not find a relationship to
recognition performance. The N250 to non-target faces showed – in
contrast to previous reports – an increase across experiment parts.
Importantly, the increase of the N250 to low-distinctive non-target
faces was correlated with memory performance in the easy task version.