4.4. Limitations
In the present study, following the original design of Tanaka et al. (2006) we have used the same image for all individuals serving as non-target faces and also the target face image was always the same. Hence, the present study may be criticized as tapping into (face) image recognition rather than face recognition, which is characterized by high variability of the images associated by the same person (Burton et al. 2016). Although a recent publication by Olderbak et al. (2022) has demonstrated that the psychometric structure of face cognition does not depend on the usage of the same or different images, one of the future research tasks should be a replication with different images of the same individuals. In this research, larger samples, more elaborated test batteries and explicit tasks for ERP recordings might be used to follow up the present findings.
Further limitations are the small number of participants, which make the association observed susceptible to outliers (see Fig. 3), and the restriction to the manifest levels of single tasks. Future studies should extend the present approach to a larger sample and to the latent level by including multiple indicators on the brain and behavioral sides.