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Investigation of visual aspects of developmental dyslexia in children

Piotrowska, Barbara; Murray, Jennifer; Willis, Alexandra; Kerridge, Jon

Authors

Alexandra Willis

Jon Kerridge



Abstract

Developmental dyslexia is a disorder characterised by difficulties with reading, despite adequate intelligence and education. Phonological deficits are often indicated as the primary cause of dyslexia. Because a range of lower-level perceptual, attentional, and motor deficits may also be present, it has been argued that phonological deficits are secondary to a visual processing deficit, underpinned by abnormalities in magnocellular or dorsal stream functioning. This proposition mainly emerges from findings which indicate that people with dyslexia show poorer sensitivity to visual stimuli designed to preferentially activate the magnocellular visual stream at the retinal level or the dorsal cortical visual stream. The current research developed a novel “Dot-to-Dot” (DtD) task that may predict children’s risk of dyslexia. The current study aimed to elucidate whether magnocellular and dorsal stream functioning are related to DtD task. It further examined whether the performance on the magnocellular and dorsal stream tasks would differ depending on the children's risk of dyslexia. 171 children aged between 6-12 years were tested on a range of cognitive, dyslexia screening and vision tests. The vision tests included contrast sensitivity tests preferentially activating magnocellular and parvocellular pathways. Coherent motion (using an RDK) and coherent form tasks were used to activate the dorsal and ventral streams respectively. The results showed that DtD measures significantly correlated with all visual tasks apart from the coherent motion task. The phonological awareness measure, arguably the best dyslexia predictor, significantly correlated with the visual task tapping into the magnocellular functioning. Furthermore, performance on this task significantly differed between children at medium risk of dyslexia and those at low risk. The current findings seem to provide evidence for the magnocellular deficit in dyslexia, which is consistent with some of the previous literature. However, DtD task was not found to tap specifically into the magnocellular or dorsal stream functioning.

Citation

Piotrowska, B., Murray, J., Willis, A., & Kerridge, J. (2017). Investigation of visual aspects of developmental dyslexia in children. Journal of Vision, 17(10), 640. https://doi.org/10.1167/17.10.640

Journal Article Type Meeting Abstract
Acceptance Date Apr 1, 2017
Publication Date Aug 31, 2017
Deposit Date Apr 15, 2019
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Journal of Vision
Publisher Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 17
Issue 10
Pages 640
DOI https://doi.org/10.1167/17.10.640
Keywords Reading, education.
Public URL http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/1729620

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