Visual-spatial-motor integration in a cross-section of primary-aged children: implications for assessing risk of Dyslexia

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

Abstract

Dyslexia is a common condition characterized by difficulties with reading and writing despite adequate intelligence, education and motivation. Many individuals with dyslexia also have problems integrating visual information over space and time, and /or motor control: however, whether sensory and motor deficits underlie phonological difficulties in dyslexia, or merely co-exist with them, remains a topic of debate. We used a novel, computer-based “dot-to-dot” (DtD) task to explore visual-motor integration in 253 children (aged 4 – 10 yrs, m=5.69; 114 females) from three primary schools in Edinburgh, UK, and its relationship with phonological and cognitive skills known to be compromised in dyslexia. We found that: (1) DtD accuracy was significantly correlated with phonological processing, rapid automatized naming (RAN) and digit span (arguably the best predictors of dyslexia); (2) DtD accuracy was a predictive variable of phonological processing adding14% of the variance to the model, (3) children deemed at “high” risk of dyslexia according to existing screening tools (e.g. LUCID-Rapid) performed significantly less accurately than those deemed at “low” risk. Follow-up testing of the youngest, pre-reading children will indicate whether or not poor visual-motor integration performance predicts later reading problems.

Citation

Piotrowska, B., Willis, A., MacLean, R., Murray, J., & Kerridge, J. (2015). Visual-spatial-motor integration in a cross-section of primary-aged children: implications for assessing risk of Dyslexia. In Proceedings European Conference on Visual Perception ECVP 2015

• Conference Name: European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP) 2015
• Start Date: Aug 22, 2015
• End Date: Aug 27, 2015
• Publication Date: 2015
• Deposit Date: Mar 3, 2016
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Book Title: Proceedings European Conference on Visual Perception ECVP 2015
• Keywords: Dyslexia; visual information; visual-motor integration; reading problems
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/id/eprint/9479