Research finds that visual problems in dyslexia may suggest that faces and words are both associated and dissociated.
In a study conducted at the University of Iceland, researchers looked to study the association between visual word and face processing. The study consisted of 24 adults with dyslexia and 36 adults without dyslexia. The participants completed both facial perception tasks, visual search tasks, and a lexical decision task. The participants were also asked to read out loud. The data from the visual search and lexical decision tasks were then analyzed to determine the results of the study.
The results suggest that readers with dyslexia tend to be worse at feature-based processing of faces when compared to readers without dyslexia. The results also found no group differences in the global processing of faces which suggests that visual and word processing are associated on the feature-based level but dissociated on the worldwide level. Overall, the results indicate that there may be a subtype of dyslexia that is characterized by high-level feature-based visual processing dysfunction.
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