Recognition of pareidolic objects in developmental prosopagnosic and neurotypical individuals

Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is a neurodevelopmental disorder associated with difficulties in the perception and recognition of faces. However, the extent to which DP affects non-face object is an ongoing debate. In this study, we asked whether pareidolic objects (which give rise to the perception of a face) are also affected in DP. First, we compared performance in DPs (n = 30) and controls (n = 27) on a recognition task with faces, pareidolic objects and non-pareidolic objects (bottles). The pareidolic objects had either similar or dissimilar image statistics to faces. Consistent with our understanding of DP, we found that the pattern of recognition across items between DPs and controls was lowest for faces. Interestingly, there was also a low correlation between DPs and controls for pareidolic-similar objects that was similar to faces. In contrast, there were higher correlations between DPs and controls for pareidolic-dissimilar objects and bottles, which were both significantly different to faces. These findings suggest that the deficit in DP involves processing image properties that are common to faces. Next, using an individual differences approach across a large group of neurotypical adults (n = 94), we found that face recognition covaried with the recognition of pareidolic-similar objects, but not with pareidolic-dissimilar objects or non-pareidolic objects. Together, these findings support the idea that a representation based on image properties plays an important role in the perception and recognition of objects and faces and that the deficit in the perception of some object categories in DP could be explained by their similarity to the image properties found in faces.