Progressive N170 habituation to unattended repeated faces

This study utilized a location-matching task to investigate whether the face-sensitive N170 event-related potential component would habituate in its response to the repeated presentation of same face stimuli when face identity was irrelevant to the experimental task. N170 amplitude decreased progressively with repeated presentation of the same face vs. sequential presentation of novel faces. This N170 habituation to face identity repetition occurred only for faces at unattended spatial locations,. likely representing a relatively pure observation of automatic early face processing. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.