Neural processing of facial expressions: An ERP study in athletes and non-athletes

Facial expressions are important cues for conveying social-emotional information, and their processing unfolds across multiple neural stages. The study employed event-related potentials to examine the neural dynamics of facial-expression change detection while testing the role of sports expertise. It further examined whether N170 responses showed prediction-error-related enhancement. Non-athletes, team-sport athletes, and individual-sport athletes completed ignore- and attend-oddball tasks, with angry and happy faces presented as rare stimulus types (deviants) and neutral faces as the frequent stimulus type (standard). An ignore-equiprobable task provided physically identical, probability-matched control stimuli for angry and happy deviants. For P1 in both oddball conditions, amplitudes were smaller for happy than for angry and neutral faces, suggesting expression-related modulation during early sensory encoding. For N170, amplitudes showed a robust graded pattern (angry > happy > neutral, more negative) in each task condition, indicating sensitivity to expression category during perceptual face representation. For P3b in the attend-oddball condition, amplitudes were larger for angry and happy faces than for neutral faces, and larger for angry than for happy faces, consistent with greater resource allocation to rare emotional targets, particularly angry faces, during task-relevant target detection and stimulus evaluation. Separately, comparison of N170 responses to probability-matched deviant and control stimuli provided no evidence for prediction-error-related N170 enhancement for either angry or happy faces. No reliable modulation by sports expertise was observed in the present sample and task conditions. Overall, multistage neural responses were strongly shaped by expression category, highlighting expression-related effects on early sensory, perceptual, and later evaluative processing.