Delayed processing of global shape information is associated with weaker top-down effects in developmental prosopagnosia.

In previous studies we have shown that a group of individuals with developmental prosopagnosia (DP): (i) were impaired at recognizing objects when presented as silhouettes or fragmented forms; stimuli which place particular demands on global shape processing, (ii) that these impairments correlated with their face recognition deficit, (iii) that they showed a reduced global precedence effect in Navon's paradigm, and (iv) that the magnitude of their global precedence effect correlated with their face and object recognition performance. This pattern of deficits points towards a delay in the processing of global shape information; a delay that may weaken top-down influences on recognition performance. Here we show that the DPs show reduced real object superiority effects (faster responses to real objects than nonobjects) compared with controls. Given that real object superiority effects reflect top-down processing, these findings support the notion of impaired global shape based top-down processing in DP.