How Does Dyslexia Affect Children’s Visual Processing?

Link between motion processing and dyslexia has been identified. Better understanding of its effects on the brain can help improve existing interventions.

Children with dyslexia process visual information slowly and their brain process is affected beyond just reading ability, reveals a new research study.

The study, published in JNeurosci and the first to combine new methods to understand visual processing and brain activity in dyslexia, challenged a group of children aged six to 14 to identify the average direction of motion of a mass of moving dots, while their brain activity was measured.

Dyslexia - Causes, Symptoms, Diagnosis, Treatment
Dyslexia is a reading disability that occurs when the brain does not properly recognize and process certain symbols.

‘Link between motion processing and dyslexia has been identified. Better understanding of its effects on the brain can help improve existing interventions.’

It found children with dyslexia took longer to gather the visual evidence, and were less accurate, than their typically developing peers, and that the behavioral differences were reflected in differences in brain activity.

Although reading ability is known to be affected by dyslexia, researchers are still unclear on which brain processes are affected by the condition. Increasing understanding of this could potentially lead to more effective support for those affected.

Dr Cathy Manning, lead researcher in the Centre for Autism at the University of Reading, said: “These findings show that the difficulties faced by children with dyslexia are not restricted to reading and writing. Instead, as a group, children with dyslexia also show differences in how they process visual information and make decisions about it.

Brain Stimulation Helps Reduce Dyslexia, a Reading Disability
The role of low-gamma oscillatory activity in phonemic processing in adults with dyslexia, a reading disability, was studied.

“Future research will be needed to see if these differences in visual processing and decision-making can be trained in order to improve reading ability in affected children, or provide clues as to the causes of dyslexia.”

Brain activity monitoring using EEG in the study showed synchronized activity over the centro-parietal regions of the brain involved in decision-making steadily increased in all of the children during the task until they made a decision. However, this happened more gradually in the children with dyslexia.

Difficulty Learning Nonsense Words Indicative of High Dyslexia Risk
Study finds that children who have difficulty in learning nonsense words may be at high risk of dyslexia.

The study supports a link between motion processing and dyslexia, although the causes are not yet known.

Whether dyslexia is, at its core, a visual processing disorder is hotly debated among researchers. With reading and writing a key challenge among children with dyslexia, increasing understanding of its effects on the brain might aid how we improve existing interventions.

Non-invasive Electrical Brain Stimulations Reduces Dyslexia
Dyslexia is a developmental reading disorder (DRD) that occurs in children with normal intelligence despite intelligence, motivation, and educational opportunities and transpires when the brain does not recognize and process certain symbols properly.

Source-Eurekalert