Socially meaningful symbolic cues are common in everyday visual environments, yet the timing with which they diverge from neutral objects during neural processing remains unclear. This study examined the temporal dynamics of one culturally meaningful class of symbolic cues, national-symbol icons, using event-related potentials (ERPs). Thirty-four Chinese university students completed a within-subject ERP task in which 30 national-symbol icons and 30 neutral-object icons were each presented twice