REVIEW article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Perception Science
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1555645
This article is part of the Research TopicVisual Perception and Mental Imagery in Aging, Health and DiseaseView all 7 articles
Face perception in the Japanese population using EEG
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Human Environments, Obu, Japan
- 2National Institute for Physiological Sciences (NIPS), Okazaki, Aichi, Japan
- 3Higashi Owari National Hospital, Nagoya, Aichi, Japan
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The face contains abundant information and plays an important role in our interactive communication. Electroencephalography (EEG) has excellent temporal resolution, making it a useful tool for investigating the time-sequence of face perception processes. Studies on development, conducted in Western populations, found that event-related potential (ERP) changes in children begin in mid-childhood. However, there are few studies on developmental changes in Japanese children. In addition, few studies have investigated whether hospitality expertise affects these processes in Western and Japanese populations. In this review, we summarize evidence from EEG studies that investigated face perception processes, with a focus on three developmental and expertise-related studies with Japanese participants. These findings are compared with studies involving Western participants to explore the influence of cultural and experiential factors on face-related brain responses. The face detection pattern in 13-year-old Japanese children is similar to that in adults. This suggests that face detection matures at this age in the Japanese population, differing from findings in Western populations. In Face perception in the Japanese 3 addition, few studies have investigated the face emotional change perception process in Western and Japanese populations. However, ERP patterns in response to facial emotional changes in Japanese children aged 7–14 differs from that in adults. This suggests that the process of perceiving facial emotional changes in the Japanese population does not fully mature by the age of 14. Moreover, facial emotion perception in the Japanese population may be influenced by hospitality expertise. We propose the following hypotheses based on this review: (1) the age of maturation for face detection and facial emotional change perception processes are different, (2) expertise may increase attention to emotion and affect the early stage of the face perception process due to training and experience, and (3) the face perception process in the Japanese population differs from that in Western populations.
Keywords: Electroencephalography (EEG), N170, Face, Japanese population, Western populations
Received: 05 Jan 2025; Accepted: 03 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Miki, Takeshima, Watanabe and Kakigi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Kensaku Miki, University of Human Environments, Obu, Japan
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