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Humans recognize familiar faces highly accurately. However, it is unclear precisely what information is stored in the underlying long-term face representations. While some have emphaszsed the importance of the eye region, other evidence has shown that faces are processed as integrated wholes. We examined the role of the eye region in activating familiar face representations using the N250r, an event-related potential correlate of repetition priming. We presented blur chimeras, i.e., spatially low-pass filtered faces with unfiltered eye regions, and observed a clear N250r which was absent for fully blurred faces (Experiments 1 and 2). However, we observed a similar N250r for chimeras with unfiltered eye or mouth regions (Experiment 3), indicating that the effect is not exclusive to the eyes. We conclude that the efficient activation of face representations is not specifically facilitated by detailed information from the eye region, and that face representations are not centred around the eyes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of language production in bilinguals have seldom considered the fact that language selection likely involves proactive control. Here, we show that Chinese-English bilinguals actively inhibit the language not-to-be used before the onset of a picture to be named. Depending on the nature of a directive cue, participants named a subsequent picture in their native language, in their second language, or remained silent. The cue elicited a contingent negative variation of event-related brain potentials, greater in amplitude when the cue announced a naming trial as compared to when it announced a silent trial. In addition, the negativity was greater in amplitude when the picture was to be named in English than in Chinese, suggesting that preparation for speech in the second language requires more inhibition than preparation for speech in the native language. This result is the first direct neurophysiological evidence consistent with proactive inhibitory control in bilingual production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]