Abstract
Abstract: :
Purpose: Brief presentation of tasks associated with primate M-pathway functions has been reported to be impaired in dyslexia. Thus this experiment aimed to compare performance of poor readers and their chronological and mental age controls on a number of functions shown with fMRI to differentially activate areas of parietal cortex receiving dorsal stream visual input. Methods: 77 schoolchildren aged 7-14 years participated in the study. On the basis of Neale reading accuracy, reading rate and Raven's progressive matrices performance 60% of children were classified as normal readers (NR), 20% as dyslexic (DD) and 20% as learning disabled (LD). Threshold performance on tests of relative motion coherence, attentive tracking, spatial alignment and 2-dot/4-dot motion discrimination were determined using PEST procedures. Results: Correlation matrices revealed that these separate parietal functions are not highly correlated. Multiple ANOVA tests indicated that there was no significant difference in the number of balls and thresholds for spatial localization and motion coherence between the good and poor readers. Conclusion: Performance on aspects of parietal functioning such as spatial localization, motion coherence and divided attention tasks where exposure time is not limited does not differentiates the performance of dyslexic, learning disabled and normal readers.
Keywords: 539 reading • 326 attention