Abstract: The N170 component is a negative brain potential, occurring at 130-200ms time windows, peaking around 160-170ms after stimulus (e.g. faces, object) onset, with a posterior lateral distribution. Recently, studies of N170 focus mainly on three questions: what cognitive mechanism N170 reflects, face structural or feature encoding; whether or not it is face-specific; or whether the component is affected by conscious awareness. In terms of the above questions, future research could investigate the effect of structural and feature encoding on N170 response, compare familiarities of different stimulus on N170, differentiate the N170 from recognition potential, and combine multiple methods to real the cognitive mechanism of N170.

Key words: N170, face recognition, structure encoding, feature encoding, category information processing, attention