The Link Between Processing Faces and Words
Open Access
- Author:
- Nelson, Kate Samantha
- Area of Honors:
- Psychology
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Reginald Adams Jr., Thesis Supervisor
Kenneth N. Levy, Thesis Honors Advisor
Kenneth N. Levy, Faculty Reader - Keywords:
- Cambridge Face Memory Test
Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy
Rapid Automatized Naming
Test of Word Reading Efficiency - Abstract:
- Recent research has suggested that reading words and reading faces share similar neural underpinnings (Behrrmann, 2011, 2012; Kelly, 1989). The line of research in this paper aims to examine behavioral evidence linking these two abilities. As part of this study, we had participants fill out a number of related measures including: The Cambridge Face Memory Test (Duchaine and Nakayama, 2006) to measure facial recognition and identify prosopagnosia, the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy (Duke and Nowicki, 1994) to measure nonverbal social expressions, the Rapid Automatized Naming (Denckla and Rudel, 1976) to measure verbal processing speed, and the Test of Word Reading Efficiency (Torgeson, Wagner, & Rashotte, 1999) to measure reading accuracy and fluency and identify dyslexia. We also included an experimental task that aimed to measure behavioral impairments in individual’s word/facial processing via neural habituation. We predicted that participants would have slower reaction times when processing words and faces following the habituation of faces and words, respectively. Unfortunately, our neural adaptation task failed to yield any evidence for habituation. However, the four standardized assessments yielded strong evidence for the link between face and word processing such that the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT) was positively correlated with the Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN), and both subsets of the Test of Word Reading Efficiency (TOWRE). These results are consistent with evidence for shared neural substrates underlying face and word processing and provide new perspectives for future research examining the two abilities in conjunction with one another.