Recent studies indicate that adults with developmental dyslexia also show deficits in face processing. These deficits may be subtle, and the majority of participants in previous studies have been university students. We report a study of face processing in a group of young dyslexics (N=25, age 18-23) enrolled in a high school education specifically designed for people with severe dyslexia, and 25 matched controls. We test whether face processing deficits are also evident in this group of young participants with severe dyslexia. We report here data from the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT) and a lexical decision task.
Comparing dyslexics to controls, we find: i) participants with dyslexia are impaired in lexical decision (as expected on a reading test); ii) on the CFMT, some dyslexics perform poorer than controls, while others perform well within the normal range.
Thus, while we find a greater variability of face recognition performance in the dyslexics compared to controls, the performance of individual participants suggests a dissociation between impaired reading and preserved face recognition.