Event-related potential (ERP) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings of brain activity have provided crucial information about the temporal unfolding of neural mechanisms involved in face processing (see a list of recent papers in Table 1). In particular, these recordings have identified a posterior-lateral negative peak at a latency of approximately 170 ms (referred to as "N170"). This peak has a larger amplitude in response to faces than to other control stimuli (such as houses, objects, trees, or words), and is sensitive to face inversion (upright vs. inverted). N170 is thought to reflect processes involved in the structural encoding of faces. In addition, several studies have found that affective information modulates brain response to human faces as early as 120–150 ms [14-17]. The combination of electromagnetic and functional neuroimaging data identified the possible generator of N1 in the ventral occipito-temporal cortex (FFA and superior temporal sulcus or STS) [16,18,19,53], suggesting that N1 might be the electromagnetic manifestation of a face-processing area activity. An analysis of the relevant literature shows that the topographic distribution of the face-specific N170 is not always right-sided in
