Electrophysiological correlates of face-evoked person knowledge

•Compared ERP responses to faces with or without biographical info.•Faces were equated for perceptual familiarity through training.•Faces with biographical info elicited more positive ∼600 centroparietal ERP.•These faces caused an early and sustained right posterior negativity in one task.•We failed to find an N400 or N170 difference between the face sets. Face recognition includes identifying a face as perceptually familiar and recollecting biographical information, or person-knowledge, associated with the face. The majority of studies examining the neural basis of face recognition have confounded these stages by comparing brain responses evoked by novel and perceptually familiar famous faces. Here, we recorded EEG in two tasks in which subjects viewed two sets of faces that were equally perceptually familiar, but which had differing levels of associated person-knowledge. Our results dissociated the effects of person-knowledge from perceptual familiarity. Faces with associated biographical information elicited a larger ∼600ms centroparietal positivity in both a passive viewing task in which subjects viewed faces without explicitly responding, and an active question-answering task in which subjects indicated whether or not they knew particular facts about the faces. In the question task only, person-knowledge was associated with a negative ERP difference over right posterior scalp over the 170–450ms interval which appeared again at long latency (>900ms).