Featural and configural processing of faces and houses in matched dyslexic and typical readers

Funding Information: We would like to thank Jane E. Joseph for providing us with visual stimuli which were a part of a larger set developed by Collins et al. (2012). We are grateful to Guðrún Rakel Eiríksdóttir for her help with task coding, Berglind Anna Víðisdóttir and Sigurður þór þórðarson for their help with recruitment/running participants, and Randi Starrfelt for her feedback on this project. This work was supported by The Icelandic Research Fund (Grant No. 174013–051 ) and the University of Iceland Research Fund. Part of this paper was presented as poster at The European Conference on Visual Perception ( ECVP ) 2019, Leuven, Belgium. Publisher Copyright: © 2021While dyslexia is typically described as a phonological deficit, recent evidence suggests that ventral stream regions, important for visual categorization and object recognition, are hypoactive in dyslexic readers who might accordingly show visual recognition deficits. By manipulating featural and configural information of faces and houses, we investigated whether dyslexic readers are disadvantaged at recognizing certain object classes or using particular visual processing mechanisms. Dyslexic readers found it harder to recognize objects (houses), suggesting that visual problems in dyslexia are not completely domain-specific. Face recognition accuracy was equivalent in the two groups. Lower recognition accuracy for houses was also related to reading difficulties even when accuracy for faces was kept constant, which could indicate a specific relationship between visual word processing and visual processing of non-face objects. Representational similarity analyses (RSA) revealed that featural and configural processes were clearly separable in typical readers, which was not the case for dyslexic readers who appear to rely on a single process. This was not restricted to particular visual categories, occurring for both faces and houses. We speculate that reading deficits in some dyslexic readers reflect their reliance on a single process for object recognition.Peer reviewe