Face recognition in beginning readers: Investigating the potential relationship between reading and face recognition during the first year of school

ABSTRACT

Reading acquisition has been suggested to drive the lateralization of the face processing system to the right cerebral hemisphere. To investigate whether this developmental co-dependency has a behavioural cost, at least in the short run, we tested whether learning to read reduced face recognition ability. In a longitudinal design, 82 children (5–7 years) were tested twice, at the beginning and end of their first year in school. In both sessions, visual letter recognition, word recognition, sentence reading, and immediate face recognition were tested. Reliable increases were found across all four measures, suggesting no absolute cost of literacy acquisition on face processing efficiency. In addition, we found no evidence suggesting a negative relationship between literacy acquisition and face recognition performance. Indeed, our results were most supportive of the null hypothesis suggesting independence in the development of literacy and face processing skills on the behavioural level.

KEYWORDS:

• Cognitive development
• face recognition
• letter naming
• reading
• word recognition

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the participants and the research assistants collecting data. This work was supported by a grant from the Synoptik-Foundation under Grant number 10-9283 to I.W., The Friends of Fakutsi Association (FFA), and The Independent Research Fund Denmark under Grant number 4001-00115 to C.G. and R.S.

Data availability statement

The dataset associated with this paper is available as a Supplementary file.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In a previous version of this manuscript, on the request of one reviewer, we included an exploratory analysis of the development of reading scores for the 22 children who showed a decline in face recognition scores. Further reviews discouraged the inclusion of this analysis. In the interest of transparency, this analysis and textual comments are available as a supplementary file (Supplementary note 1).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Synoptik-Foundation: [grant number 10-9283]; The Independent Research Fund Denmark: [grant number 4001-00115].