While 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 utilizing particular visual processing mechanisms. Dyslexic readers found it harder to recognize objects (houses), suggesting that visual problems in dyslexia are not completely domain-specific. Mean accuracy for faces was equivalent in the two groups, compatible with domain-specificity in face processing. While face recognition abilities correlated with reading ability, lower house accuracy was nonetheless related to reading difficulties even when accuracy for faces was kept constant, suggesting a specific relationship between visual word recognition and the recognition of non-face objects. Representational similarity analyses (RSA) revealed that featural and configural processes were clearly separable in typical readers, while dyslexic readers appeared to rely on a single process. This occurred for both faces and houses and was not restricted to particular visual categories. We speculate that reading deficits in some dyslexic readers reflect their reliance on a single process for object recognition.
Absorption principle and techno-economic analysis of CO2 absorption technologies: A review
