4.4. Limitations
In the present study, following the original design of Tanaka et al.
(2006) we have used the same image for all individuals serving as
non-target faces and also the target face image was always the same.
Hence, the present study may be criticized as tapping into (face) image
recognition rather than face recognition, which is characterized by high
variability of the images associated by the same person (Burton et al.
2016). Although a recent publication by Olderbak et al. (2022) has
demonstrated that the psychometric structure of face cognition does not
depend on the usage of the same or different images, one of the future
research tasks should be a replication with different images of the same
individuals. In this research, larger samples, more elaborated test
batteries and explicit tasks for ERP recordings might be used to follow
up the present findings.
Further limitations are the small number of participants, which make the
association observed susceptible to outliers (see Fig. 3), and the
restriction to the manifest levels of single tasks. Future studies
should extend the present approach to a larger sample and to the latent
level by including multiple indicators on the brain and behavioral
sides.