Gender Word Semantic Satiation Inhibits Facial Gender Information Processing

Abstract. In order to explore the time course of the influence of gender words semantic satiation on facial gender information processing, the semantic satiation paradigm was used to induce semantic satiation by presenting Chinese gender words “男, 女 (Male, Female)” for a long duration (25 s), with conjunction words “及(And), 且(Moreover)” served as the baseline (the Chinese words and their English translations do not completely equal in terms of pronunciation, form, and sense). Participants were asked to judge whether the two simultaneously presented faces (Experiment 1) or two successively presented faces (Experiment 2) were of the same gender. The results of Experiment 1 showed that the response time in semantic satiation condition was significantly longer than that of the baseline condition. The event-related potential (ERP) results of Experiment 2 showed that the peak amplitude of P1 component in semantic satiation condition was significantly smaller than that of the baseline condition in the early stage of face processing; N170, a specific component of face perception, in semantic satiation condition was significantly larger than that of the baseline condition. The average amplitude of LPC in semantic satiation condition was significantly smaller than that of the baseline condition. This study shows that facial gender information processing is affected by its semantic contextual information. The inhibition effect of gender word semantic satiation on facial gender information processing starts at the attention orientation stage, then continues to the face structural encoding stage, and eventually ends at the advanced cognitive response stage.