Breakthrough Percepts of Familiar Faces

In Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP), the vast majority of stimuli are not consciously perceived, but the salient ones breakthrough into awareness and can be reported. In addition, these breakthrough events are observable with EEG, since they generate a P3 or other distinguishing components. The Fringe-P3 method is based upon these characteristics. Concealed knowledge studies have successfully employed this Fringe-P3 method using own-name and own email-address, with the method being shown to be less vulnerable to counter-measures than other approaches. It has also been shown that famous faces presented in RSVP differentially break into awareness and generate a distinct evoked response component.

In this paper, we further enhance the applicability of the Fringe-P3 concealed knowledge test by demonstrating the effectiveness of the method on personally-familiar faces. While salient, such stimuli do not have the exquisite salience of famous faces, being a better match to the level of salience that might be found in forensic applications. Our findings suggest that the Fringe-P3 method could be used to detect intrinsic salience of familiar faces, even when there was no task associated with these faces. We investigated the sensitivity of the ERP-based RSVP paradigm to infer recognition of familiar faces, and performed statistical inference in the Time and Frequency domains, to differentiate between known and unknown faces, at group and participant levels.