Abstract

© 2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Visual experiences increase our ability to discriminate environmentally relevant stimuli at the cost of a reduced sensitivity to irrelevant or infrequent stimuli —a developmental progression known as perceptual narrowing. One possible source of the reduced sensitivity in distinguishing non-native stimuli could be underspecified attentional search templates. To determine whether perceptual narrowing stems from underspecified attentional templates for non-native exemplars, this study used ERP and behavioral measures in a visual search task, where the target was either an exemplar or a category. The N2pc component, an ERP marker of early attentional selection emerging at 200 msec poststimulus, is typically modulated by the specificity of the target and, therefore, by the attentional template—the N2pc is larger for specific items versus categories. In two experiments using both human and ape faces, we found that perceptual narrowing affects later response selection, but not early attentional selection relying on attentional templates. Our ERP results show that adults deploy exemplar level attentional templates for non-native stimuli, despite poor downstream behavioral performance. Our findings suggest that longterm previous experience with reduced exemplar level judgments does not appear to eliminate early attentional selection of non-native exemplars.