Breakthrough percepts of famous names

Studies have shown that presenting own-name stimuli on the fringe of awareness in Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) generates a P3 component and provides an accurate and countermeasure resistant method for detecting identity deception (Bowman et al., 2013, 2014). The current study investigates how effective this Fringe-P3 method is at detecting recognition of familiar name stimuli with lower salience (i.e. famous names) than own-name stimuli, as well as its accuracy with multi-item stimuli (i.e. first and second name pairs presented sequentially). The results demonstrated a highly significant ERP difference between famous and non famous names at the group level and a detectable P3 for famous names for 86% of participants at the individual level. This demonstrates that the Fringe-P3 method can be used for detecting name stimuli other than own-names and for multi-item stimuli, thus further supporting the method’s potential usefulness in forensic applications such as in detecting recognition of accomplices.