The Neurophysiologic Difference between Shy and Nonshy Undergraduates in Early Face Processing: An ERP Study

Now the neurophysiologic studies of shyness focus on the influence of expressional valence and facial new-old effects on face processing, but these studies disregard the possible neurophysiologic differences in the basic face recognition ability --face and object recognition. This study tries to find the neurophysiologic differences between 17 shy undergraduates and 17 nonshy undergraduates in facial structural encoding by adopting ERP and seeing about the N170 component in face recognition. According to the study, we find that: (1) nonshy undergraduates have processing dominance on facial configuration, the N170 amplitude of nonshy undergraduates is much greater than that of shy undergraduates when viewing the face, but the difference does not exist between shy and nonshy undergraduates when viewing objects; (2) N170 is a specific component to face recognition, N170 amplitude elicited by face pictures is much greater than that elicited by object pictures; (3) The right hemisphere shows processing dominance on N170 when processing faces.