Rapid stream stimulation can enhance the stimulus selectivity of early evoked responses to written characters but not faces

The recognition potential (RP) is an early visually evoked response (~250 ms) whose magnitude is sensitive to object recognizability and related factors. The RP is often measured when objects are embedded in a rapid stream of masking stimuli (the RSS paradigm), especially in reading research. The idea is that RSS provides greater stimulus-dependent variations in RP, compared to the corresponding variations without RSS. However, this idea has never been subject to systematic evaluation. We directly test whether RSS can enhance 2 types of RP stimulus selectivity, by measuring the RP in conditions that only differ in the presence or absence of a masking stream and in the type of stimulus shown. We measure the effect of image inversion on RP for Chinese characters (experiment 1); the effect of orthographical correctness on RP for Chinese characters (experiment 3); and as a control study, the effect of image inversion on the N170 response to faces (experiment 2). To ensure a fair comparison, the earliest negative deflections (RP/N170) measured with and without RSS should at least have similar channel ranges, and topographical distributions of both amplitude and selectivity. Our first set of results clearly supports this. Our main results clearly show an increase in stimulus-selectivity for RSS over non-RSS in both of the RP (Chinese character) experiments, but no such enhancement in the N170 (face) experiment. This provides incentive for investigations into the underlying mechanisms of selectivity enhancement. Our findings may also help to explain contradictory findings between RP/N170 studies that differ only in the use of noise masks, which is sometimes treated as trivial detail in papers that do not reference the RP/RSS literature.