Are reading and face processing related? An investigation of reading in developmental prosopagnosia

Abstract

Recent hypotheses suggest that learning to read influences the cognitive and cerebral organization of other perceptual skills, including face processing. Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is a disorder of face recognition in the absence of acquired brain injury, and in the context of normal intelligence and general cognitive development. To shed light on the potential relationship between reading and face processing in this group (and in general), we investigated reading performance in 10 participants with DP and 20 matched controls. We find that the group of DPs perform strikingly similar to the control group on four sensitive reading tests measuring visual recognition and naming of single letters and words, word length effects, and text reading speed and comprehension. Thus, there is a clear dissociation between impaired face processing and preserved reading in this group, a finding that challenges the recently proposed hypothesis that reading acquisition and face processing abilities are intrinsically linked. Developmental prosopagnosics can learn to read as fluently as normal subjects, while they are seemingly unable to learn efficient strategies for recognizing faces.