Visual motion perception in Chinese dyslexic children

Abstract

Studies on the visual system of English-speaking dyslexics have provided some evidence to suggest that a magnocellular pathway abnormality may be associated with developmental dyslexia. Magnocellular pathway has been found to be crucial for visual motion perception. The present study examined this magnocellular pathway deficit hypothesis in a nonalphabetic script, Chinese. Twenty-four Hong Kong Chinese primary school children with developmental dyslexia and 24 age-matched average readers were tested with a global motion coherence task. It was found that the control group significantly outperformed the dyslexia group in the global motion coherence task. This finding suggests that Chinese dyslexic children may also exhibit a magnocellular pathway deficit like their alphabetic counterparts. In addition, a better performance observed in the blue condition of the motion coherence task among the dyslexic children suggested the potential of blue stimuli in enhancing magnocellular activity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)(journal abstract)