Visual Functions in Children with Dyslexia
Journal Title: The 1st Annual Meeting of Georgian Center for Neuroscience Research - Year 2020, Vol 2, Issue 20
Abstract
Dyslexia or difficulty in reading is one of the most common type of learning disabilities. Underlying mechanisms of this disability are not fully understood and are debated for a long time. Although deficits in magnocellular visual system and declined motion discrimination are evidenced, still scientific evidences about declines in visual functions remain controversial. Here we investigated state of different visual functions in children with dyslexia and their age and IQ match typically developed children. Forty-two children with dyslexia and forty-two typically developed children (8-10 years old in both groups) participated in our experiments. The following visual functions were tested: motion discrimination using coherent motion and biological motion discrimination tasks, visual attention using visual search task and visual working memory using visual N-back task. To check developmental aspects of visual functions in children with dyslexia all participants were retested after a year from the first testing. We found that performance of coherent motion discrimination was not significantly different for two groups of children, but typically developing children performed the biological motion task significantly better than children with dyslexia. Retesting after a year showed the same results. There was no significant differences in performance (correct responses) of visual search task between two groups of children in the first measurement. However, there were differences in reaction times - children with dyslexia responded slowly. Reaction times for both groups decreased during second measurements but still reaction times of dyslexic children were higher. As to visual memory tasks, children with dyslexia performed the simple condition (1-back) worse than compare to typically developing children, whereas there was no difference in performance for more complex condition (2-back). Retesting showed same results however performances for children of both groups tended to improve. Our results show that some aspects of visual functions, specifically magnocellular processing, visual selective attention and working memory are declined not only in children with dyslexia, also in typically developing children. We conclude that such deficiency can be result of ongoing developmental processes in children in general and in dyslexia for the deficits in reading ability other mechanisms also play role. (The work was supported by Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation of Georgia (SRNSFG) [YS- 2016-38] and [FR #217516]).
Authors and Affiliations
Khatuna Parkosadze, Marina Kunchulia, Archil Kezeli
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