There is considerable interest in whether face and word processing are reliant upon shared or dissociable processes. Developmental prosopagnosia is associated with lifelong face processing deficits, with these cases providing strong support for a dissociation between face and word recognition in three recent papers (Burns et al., 2017; Rubino et al., 2016; Starrfelt et al., 2018). However, the sample sizes in each of these studies may have been too small to detect significant effects. We therefore combined their data to increase power and reassessed their results. While only a non-significant trend for reading impairments was found in prosopagnosia using a one-sample t-test, poorer face memory performance was correlated with slower reading speeds across prosopagnosia and control participants. Surprisingly, poorer face perception skills in prosopagnosia were associated with smaller word length effects. This suggests that while mild reading impairments exist in developmental prosopagnosia, there may be a trade-off between their residual face perception abilities and reading skill. A reanalysis of Hills and colleagues’ (2015) acquired prosopagnosia data also revealed a positive relationship between words and faces: severe impairments in face recognition were related to poorer word processing. In summary, the developmental and acquired prosopagnosia literature supports models of visual perception that posit face and word processing are reliant upon broadly shared processes.

人们对面部和文字处理是否依赖于共享或可分离的过程非常感兴趣。发育性面容失认症与终生面部处理缺陷有关，这些案例为最近的三篇论文（Burns 等人，2017；Rubino 等人，2016；Starrfelt 等人，2018）中的面部和文字识别之间的分离提供了强有力的支持。 . 然而，这些研究中的每一项的样本量都可能太小而无法检测到显着的影响。因此，我们结合了他们的数据以增加功效并重新评估了他们的结果。虽然使用单样本t在面容失认症中仅发现阅读障碍的非显着趋势- 测试，较差的面部记忆表现与面容失认症和对照参与者的较慢阅读速度相关。令人惊讶的是，面容失认症中较差的面部感知技能与较小的字长效应有关。这表明，虽然发育性面容失认症存在轻度阅读障碍，但他们的剩余面部感知能力和阅读技能之间可能存在权衡。对 Hills 及其同事 (2015) 获得的面容失认症数据的重新分析也揭示了单词和面部之间的正相关关系：面部识别的严重障碍与较差的文字处理能力有关。总之，发展性和获得性面容失认症文献支持视觉感知模型，即面部和文字处理依赖于广泛共享的过程。