, 2009). Expression recognition skills were assessed in the DPs reported here using the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test, and when compared with appropriate published norming data (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Hill, Raste, & Plumb, 2001), no deficits were observed. Lower-level vision was also assessed

in order to check whether the participants’ difficulties in face recognition were Selleck AZD2281 underpinned by basic perceptual impairments. Four sub-tests from the Birmingham Object Recognition Battery (BORB: Humphreys & Riddoch, 1993) that have been used in previous investigations (e.g., Bate, Cook, Mole, & Cole, 2013; Garrido et al., 2009) were selected. In the Length Match test, participants are required to judge whether two lines are of the same length; in the Size Match test they judge whether two circles are of the same size; in the Orientation Match test they decide whether two lines are parallel or not; and in the Position of the Gap Match test they decide whether the position of the gap in two circles is in the

same place or not. Basic object recognition was tested using the Object Decision test from the BORB. In this test, the participant is presented with a series of line drawings which depict this website animals or tools. In some trials the drawings represent ‘unreal’ objects (i.e., the picture shows half of one object combined with half of another object), and the participant is asked to decide whether each of 128 drawings represents a real or unreal object. Appropriate norming data for these tests are presented within the BORB, and while eight of the DP participants did not show any evidence of lower-level perceptual difficulties, DP7 was impaired on the Length Match test and DP10 was impaired on both the Length Match and Object Decision tests. As described above, this may reflect the heterogeneity of the condition and the possibility that different sub-types of DP exist. Because DP7 and DP10 only performed poorly on one or two of the five sub-tests, any lower-level visual impairments were not deemed to be severe and the participants

were not removed from our sample. Ten next control participants also participated in this study. They were matched to the DP participants according to age (M = 46.8, SD = 13.2), gender (seven male) and estimated IQ [using the Wechsler Test of Adult Reading (WTAR): Wechsler, 2001]. All participants reported normal or corrected-to-normal vision. Exclusion criteria were pregnancy, medication, significant medical or psychiatric illness, history of substance abuse, and epilepsy. All participants provided written consent and participated on a voluntary basis. The study was approved by the departmental Ethics Committee at Bournemouth University. Face memory task: Two new versions of the CFMT ( Duchaine & Nakayama, 2006) were created for use in this experiment (see Fig. 1A). The CFMT is a measure commonly used to assess facial identity memory ( Richler et al., 2011 and Wilmer et al.