Word and text processing in developmental prosopagnosia

ABSTRACT

The “many-to-many” hypothesis proposes that visual object processing is supported by distributed circuits that overlap for different object categories. For faces and words the hypothesis posits that both posterior fusiform regions contribute to both face and visual word perception and predicts that unilateral lesions impairing one will affect the other. However, studies testing this hypothesis have produced mixed results. We evaluated visual word processing in subjects with developmental prosopagnosia, a condition linked to right posterior fusiform abnormalities. Ten developmental prosopagnosic subjects performed a word-length effect task and a task evaluating the recognition of word content across variations in text style, and the recognition of style across variations in word content. All subjects had normal word-length effects. One had prolonged sorting time for word recognition in handwritten stimuli. These results suggest that the deficit in developmental prosopagnosia is unlikely to affect visual word processing, contrary to predictions of the many-to-many hypothesis.

KEYWORDS:

• Face recognition
• lateralization
• text processing

Acknowledgments

The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCiD

Sherryse L. Corrow http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7774-8453

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) [grant number MOP-102567 awarded to J.B.]; a Canada Research Chair in support of J.B.; the Marianne Koerner Chair in Brain Diseases in support of J.B.; the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) [grant number RES-062-23-2426 awarded to BD]; the Hitchcock Foundation in support of B.D.; and the National Eye Institute of the National Institutes of Health [grant number F32 EY023479-02 awarded to S.C.]. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.