Sandro Franceschini

A Causal Link between Visual Spatial Attention and Reading Acquisition

Reading is a unique, cognitive human skill crucial to life in modern societies, but, for about 10% of the children, learning to read is extremely difficult. They are affected by a neurodevelopmental disorder called dyslexia. Although impaired auditory and speech sound processing is widely assumed to characterize dyslexic individuals, emerging evidence suggests that dyslexia could arise from a more basic cross-modal letter-to-speech sound integration deficit. Letters have to be precisely selected from irrelevant and cluttering letters by rapid orienting of visual attention before the correct letter-to-speech sound integration applies. Here we ask whether prereading visual parietal-attention functioning may explain future reading emergence and development. The present 3 year longitudinal study shows that prereading attentional orienting--assessed by serial search performance and spatial cueing facilitation--captures future reading acquisition skills in grades 1 and 2 after controlling for age, nonverbal IQ, speech-sound processing, and nonalphabetic cross-modal mapping. Our findings provide the first evidence that visual spatial attention in preschoolers specifically predicts future reading acquisition, suggesting new approaches for early identification and efficient prevention of dyslexia.

Action Video Games Make Dyslexic Children Read Better

Learning to read is extremely difficult for about 10% of children; they are affected by a neurodevelopmental disorder called dyslexia [1, 2]. The neurocognitive causes of dyslexia are still hotly debated [3-12]. Dyslexia remediation is far from being fully achieved [13], and the current treatments demand high levels of resources [1]. Here, we demonstrate that only 12 hr of playing action video games-not involving any direct phonological or orthographic training-drastically improve the reading abilities of children with dyslexia. We tested reading, phonological, and attentional skills in two matched groups of children with dyslexia before and after they played action or nonaction video games for nine sessions of 80 min per day. We found that only playing action video games improved childrens reading speed, without any cost in accuracy, more so than 1 year of spontaneous reading development and more than or equal to highly demanding traditional reading treatments. Attentional skills also improved during action video game training. It has been demonstrated that action video games efficiently improve attention abilities [14, 15]; our results showed that this attention improvement can directly translate into better reading abilities, providing a new, fast, fun remediation of dyslexia that has theoretical relevance in unveiling the causal role of attention in reading acquisition.

Decreased coherent motion discrimination in autism spectrum disorder: the role of attentional zoom-out deficit.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has been associated with decreased coherent dot motion (CDM) performance, a task that measures magnocellular sensitivity as well as fronto-parietal attentional integration processing. In order to clarify the role of spatial attention in CDM tasks, we measured the perception of coherently moving dots displayed in the central or peripheral visual field in ASD and typically developing children. A dorsal-stream deficit in children with ASD should predict a generally poorer performance in both conditions. In our study, however, we show that in children with ASD, CDM perception was selectively impaired in the central condition. In addition, in the ASD group, CDM efficiency was correlated to the ability to zoom out the attentional focus. Importantly, autism symptoms severity was related to both the CDM and attentional zooming-out impairment. These findings suggest that a dysfunction in the attentional network might help to explain decreased CDM discrimination as well as the “core” social cognition deficits of ASD.

A Serious Game for Predicting the Risk of Developmental Dyslexia in Pre-Readers Children

Dyslexia is one of the main cognitive disabilities affecting the reading acquisition. As it may interfere with educational opportunities even in presence of adequate intelligence, it is of crucial importance to obtain early diagnosis and help affected children as soon as possible. Generally, dyslexia is diagnosed not earlier than primary school as difficulties in reading is used as first indicator. Yet, being able to detect and treat this problem even in preschool years would ensure better chances to limit its impact and help the childs future reading ability. To this aim, we discuss here a series of serious games we designed and tested to train specific skills that have been proven to be effective against dyslexia.

“Shall We Play a Game?”: Improving Reading Through Action Video Games in Developmental Dyslexia

Impaired linguistic-phonological processing is the most accepted explanation of developmental dyslexia (DD). However, growing literature shows that DD is the result of the combination of several neurocognitive causes. Visual attention and magnocellular-dorsal (MD) pathway deficits are now considered causes of DD. Interestingly, a large portion of literature showed that action video games (AVG) are able to improve attentional and perceptual skills in typical readers. Consequently, employing AVG trainings in individuals with DD could improve attention and perception, resulting in better reading skills. The aim of our review is to show the benefits of the AVG training on DD through the changes in the neurocognitive functions at the basis of learning to read. Since visual attentional and MD dysfunctions can be diagnosed in infancy, our review paves the way for possible early prevention programs that could use AVG training.

Action video games improve reading abilities and visual-to-auditory attentional shifting in English-speaking children with dyslexia

Dyslexia is characterized by difficulties in learning to read and there is some evidence that action video games (AVG), without any direct phonological or orthographic stimulation, improve reading efficiency in Italian children with dyslexia. However, the cognitive mechanism underlying this improvement and the extent to which the benefits of AVG training would generalize to deep English orthography, remain two critical questions. During reading acquisition, children have to integrate written letters with speech sounds, rapidly shifting their attention from visual to auditory modality. In our study, we tested reading skills and phonological working memory, visuo-spatial attention, auditory, visual and audio-visual stimuli localization, and cross-sensory attentional shifting in two matched groups of English-speaking children with dyslexia before and after they played AVG or non-action video games. The speed of words recognition and phonological decoding increased after playing AVG, but not non-action video games. Furthermore, focused visuo-spatial attention and visual-to-auditory attentional shifting also improved only after AVG training. This unconventional reading remediation program also increased phonological short-term memory and phoneme blending skills. Our report shows that an enhancement of visuo-spatial attention and phonological working memory, and an acceleration of visual-to-auditory attentional shifting can directly translate into better reading in English-speaking children with dyslexia.

Serious Games for Early Identification of Developmental Dyslexia

Developmental Dyslexia (DD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder affecting reading acquisition. DD cannot be diagnosed before starting the primary school; thereby, one of the main challenges is to obtain an early DD identification even during preschool years. Achieving this goal could help children at risk for DD to limit the impact of this disorder. To this aim, we have created a digital system composed of various serious games designed for predicting the risk of DD in preschoolers and potentially training specific skills impaired in this learning disability. Our set of serious games are designed to be accessible from any device, a computer with mouse and keyboard, but also a tablet with touch interface for younger children.

A different vision of dyslexia: Local precedence on global perception

Individuals perceive the wor(l)d hierarchically. Firsty, the global visual scene is processed by the right hemisphere, and later, the local features are perceived by the left hemisphere. Based on this hierarchical analysis, humans evolved unique communication ability: reading. However, for about 10% of people reading acquisition is extremely difficult, they are affected by a heritable neurodevelopmental disorder called dyslexia. Differences in perceiving the wor(l)d might be one of the causes of reading disabilities. Here we show multiple causal links between the global before local perception and learning to read. Five behavioral experiments in 353 children reveal that: (i) a local before global perception characterizes three independent groups of unselected children with dyslexia; (ii) two global before local perception trainings improve reading skills in children with dyslexia; and stringently (iii) pre-reading local before global perception longitudinally predicts future poor readers. Challenging the uni-causal and left-lateralized phonological explanation of dyslexia, our results demonstrate that learning to read depends also on an efficient right neural network for the global analysis of the visual scene. These results provide new insights in learning strategies and pave the way for early identification and possible prevention programs.

The causal link between magnocellular-dorsal pathway functioning and dyslexia

Impaired auditory-phonological processing is widely assumed to characterize dyslexic individuals. However, the magnocellular-dorsal (MD) pathway deficit theory, while controversial, has long been argued to play an important role in developmental dyslexia. The debate has centered on the critique that the visual MD deficit found in individuals with developmental dyslexia could just be a consequence of an impoverished reading experience. Here, we employ a comprehensive approach that incorporates all the accepted methods required to test the relationship between the MD pathway and developmental dyslexia: (i) a comparison with reading level controls, that are younger controls who read at the same level as the dyslexics (Experiment 1); (ii) a prospective-longitudinal approach, in which MD functioning was measured in pre-readers and a correlation then established with the future reading development (Experiment 2); and (iii) two remediation studies, in which the MD pathway is specifically trained and reading improvement is established (Experiment 3 and 4). The results of all the four experiments point strongly in the direction of a causal relationship between MD deficit and developmental dyslexia. Since an MD dysfunction can be diagnosed much earlier than a reading and language disorders, our findings pave the way for low resource-intensive, early prevention programs that could drastically reduce the incidence of reading disorders. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015.

Multiplatform games for Dyslexia identification in preschoolers

Dyslexia is a learning disability affecting the ability to process written and sometimes even spoken language. It affects educational opportunities of about 10% of children, regardless of their intelligence. One of the main challenges is to be able to identify Dyslexia in preschoolers. To this aim we have developed a set of serious games that are the core of this demo. Our games have been created with a multiplatform approach so as to generate, in a single effort, game versions for mobile platforms and the Web. They have also been designed to be adequately challenging and fun for their target users, as well as effective.