Abstract
Purpose: Preliminary evidence indicated that children with a reading disorder (RD) may have deviance in their ability to perform high demanding cognitive tasks, such as reading, depending on somatosensory inputs. Until now, only anecdotical reports suggested that improving somatosensory inputs may influence their ability to maintain a stable perception of the visual world despite continuous movements of our eyes, head, and body. Here, we investigated whether changes in upright perception, the subjective visual vertical (SVV), were modulated by somatosensory inputs in a group of children with RD.Method: The SVV task was used under two distinct conditions, i.e., with or without somatosensory inputs from the foot. We enrolled a group of 20 children with reading disorders and 20 sex-, age-, IQ- matched children with neurotypical development.Results: Responses to the SVV task were found to be significantly less accurate in children with RD than in children with neurotypical development (p < 0.001). In the latter, SVV response did not depend on somatosensory inputs from the foot. In contrast, in children with RD somatosensory inputs, either improved or worsen their SVV depending on the tilt direction (p < 0.01).Conclusion: Our results suggested that SVV responses in children with RD could be related to an immaturity for heteromodal sensory integration, including somatosensory inputs.
Highlights
Reading disorder (RD), called dyslexia, is a brainbased type of learning disability that impairs a person’s ability to read
The subjective visual vertical (SVV) absolute measures in children with RD and in the sex, age, and IQ- matched children with neurotypical development were compared under the two distinct somatosensory conditions when performing counterclockwise or clockwise tilt movements (Figure 2)
Whatever the conditions explored in the experiment, subjects with RD showed a severe deficit in SVV, reaching up to 50–80% of additional distortion compared to controls
Summary
Reading disorder (RD), called dyslexia, is a brainbased type of learning disability that impairs a person’s ability to read. Individuals with RD typically read at levels significantly lower than expected despite having normal intelligence This disorder varies from person to person, common characteristics among people with RD are difficulties with phonological processing (the manipulation of sounds), spelling, and/or rapid visual-verbal responding. Individuals with RD display a deficit in spatial body representation and localization, associated with an impairment in their own motion detection perception [3] This global distortion of self-spatial representation is correlated with a deficiency in postural control [4]. Most of these findings point toward an impairment in cerebellar integration of complex sensory inputs. Children with RD showed less accurate compensatory sensory strategies to maintain an efficient postural stability, when further affecting the feedback of somatosensory inputs [7]
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