Noise Exclusion Deficits in Dyslexia
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
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The human visual system includes two pathways, magnocellular and parvocellular, deriving from two types of retinal ganglion cells that project to different layers of the lateral geniculate nucleus. Generally speaking, the magnocelluar pathway is specialized for movement while the parvocellular pathway is specialized for color and detail. Some researchers have found dyslexia to be associated with magnocelluar impairment, although evidence has been mixed.
A paper from Sperling and colleagues argues that magnocelluar deficits in dyslexica may actually be a deficit in noise exclusion. The authors tested children with and without dyslexia using stimuli that were designed to activate the magnocellular or parvocellular pathways. The magnocellular stimulus was a patch with white bars that alternated rapidly between light and dark. The parvocellular stimulus had thin light and dark bars that did not alternate.
In addition to the two stimulus types, there was a high noise and low noise condition. In the low noise condition, one of the stimuli appeared to the left or right of the fixation mark. In the high noise condition, noise patches appeared on either side of fixation and the stimulus was overlaid onto one of the noise patches. In both cases, child had to say on which side the stimulus appeared.
The authors calculated contrast thresholds (the amount of contrast needed between the light and dark bars for accurate detection) for both groups of children. They found no difference in the contrast thresholds for the low noise condition. In the high noise condition, dyslexic children had higher contrast thresholds (more difficulty detecting) for both the magnocellular and parvocellular stimuli. In addition, thresholds in the high noise condition were correlated with language measures.
These are interesting results. While one study cannot rule out the magnocellular theory of dyslexia, this does open the possibility that many of the results that pointed to a magnocellular deficit were actually cases of noise exclusion deficit. I do remember one paper about motion perception and dyslexia that can't be explained by noise, so I'll see if I can write about that later.
Another question is, how does noise exclusion lead to dyslexia? It could be that a noise exclusion deficit results in difficulties building phonological categories, which in turn affect reading. The authors also mention that noise exclusion could affect learning in the visual modality by making it harder to extract regularities from different fonts and scripts.
Sperling, A., Lu, Z., Manis, F., & Seidenberg, M. (2005). Deficits in perceptual noise exclusion in developmental dyslexia Nature Neuroscience DOI: 10.1038/nn1474
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3 comments:
For visual dyslexics that can describe visual problems that make reading difficult See Right Dyslexia Glasses have close to a 100% success rate at removing those visual problems.
I am always surprised reading that there appears to be a general visual deficit in dyslexics as only a minority of dyslexics seem to have visual problems as a cause of their reading problems.
Rather than asking "how does noise exclusion lead to dyslexia?", the question should potentially be how does the underlying genetics lead to both noise exclusion deficient AND problems with phonemic awareness.
In my readings, the following are essential facts of dyslexia:
1. It is a problem with phonemic awareness--ie, the ability to discriminate the individual sound building blocks (phonemes).
2. It is genetically inherited. At least 6 genes have been shown to correlate with dyslexia.
3. Some of these genes that have been implicated affect neuronal connection development and connections.
4. Appropriate tutoring can establish phoneme awareness AND appropriate neuronal connections (functional MRI investigations).
5. Dyslexia occurs with variable severity, from mild to severe. In my work with people with dyslexia, using anecdotal evidence, I have made the following observation--the more severe the dyslexia, the more often sensory and memory problems co-exist.
I'd speculate that because the underlying genetics involves neuronal development other pathways (including visual and memory retrieval) may show problems as well.
Good points Gayle. Do you do research in the field or work clinically with dyslexia?
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