Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Considering basic visual decoding is the first step of reading, a growing group of studies focused on the visual-spatial attentional processing of the dyslexics. Visual-spatial attention refers to attentional processes that select visual stimuli based on their spatial location, and it can be measured by a set of visual tasks, such as visual search task, visual attention span task, Posner cue task. Many studies in the context of alphabetic language and Chinese reported that individuals with developmental dyslexia may exhibit poor behavioral performance and abnormal neural activity in visual-spatial attention tasks. The underlying mechanism of the relevant neural deficit may not only stem from the atypical activation in the parietal gyrus which were responsible for the visual-spatial attention, but also might be associated with weak functional connectivity between brain regions (e.g., the functional connectivity between parietal lobe and visual word form area). Future studies should explore the development in visual-spatial attention of the dyslexics by cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. Meanwhile, it is necessary to investigate the possible modulation of language characteristics on visual-spatial attention deficit of dyslexia.
Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： A specific deficit in individuals with developmental dyslexia has been repeatedly found in many tasks that had one aspect in common, that was, the processing of multiple visual elements in parallel. This skill is regarded as the visual attention span. This paper reviews the relevant literature about the visual attention span of the dyslexics in the contexts of alphabetic languages and Chinese. Currently, the relevant findings have been still in debate, and the inconsistent results may be attributed to the differences in orthographic depth of the background language and the participants’ ages. Future studies can further explore the relationship between visual attention span and reading disability through the methods of the intervention study and cross-language comparison; meanwhile the neural mechanisms underlying the visual attention span of Chinese individuals with dyslexia could be investigated by the neuroimaging techniques.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and developmental dyslexia (DD) are two common neurodevelopmental disorders in children, and the prevalence of the comorbidity between these two disorders varies from25% to 48%. This comorbidity not only exposes children to cognitive, behavioral, and psychological impairments but also brings a heavy burden to their families, schools, and society. Hence, intervention for children with comorbidity between ADHD and DD is extremely important and necessary. Based on the hypothesis regarding the pathological mechanism of this comorbidity, previous intervention studies can be divided into two categories as below: 1) Intervention programs based on the phenotype hypothesis, that is, the intervention targeting the core deficits in one of ADHD and DD is predicted to improve the symptoms of the other disorder. For example, the usage of pharmacological intervention targeting ADHD symptoms, or reading intervention targeting dyslexia, or the combination of the two interventions. These intervention programs have been found to exhibit direct benefits on the targeted disorder, but relevant transfer effect and retention effect especially on the symptoms of the other disorder still need to be further checked and examined. Moreover, the combined programs of medication and reading intervention have additive effects as compared to the intervention program targeting only one disorder, but no incremental effect has been found. This lack of interaction of the intervention effects challenges the phenotype hypothesis to some extent. 2) Intervention programs based on the common deficit hypothesis. For example, preliminary benefits have been found in the intervention focusing on processing speed, that is, one of the critical common deficits between ADHD and DD, in which the significantly transfer effect has been observed. Although relevant intervention studies targeting common deficits between ADHD and DD are scarce, previous findings supported the feasibility of these intervention programs and provide some enlightenment for future direction. More studies can be further carried out from the following aspects: Firstly, to design intervention of the comorbidity based on the theoretical hypotheses. On the one hand, it is better to extensively explore the potential core factors regarding the common deficits between ADHD and DD so as to examine the etiology of the comorbidity and to design relevant cognitive training programs; on the other hand, future studies should utilize various types of intervention programs on the basis of the phenotype hypothesis, so as to fully verify the hypothesis and comprehensively investigate the training effects of the corresponding intervention programs. Secondly, more studies with multi-modal techniques are required to explore the etiology of the comorbidity, to systematically evaluate the training effects from the direct, transfer, and retention effects, as well as the possible mechanism underlying the training benefits. Finally, parental intervention and teacher training should be integrated into the intervention system for the children with ADHD-DD comorbidity to form a child-parent-school community, with contributing to the development of these comorbided children via a home-school cooperation.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Developmental dyslexia is a specific disorder in reading acquisition, which hinders the development of individuals. Many researchers focused on how to help the dyslexics to improve their reading skills. Traditional intervention methods are mainly based on phonological deficit of dyslexia, in which there are still some problems required to be solved such as consuming considerable time and labors in intervention implementation, and reading materials putting pressures on dyslexic readers. In recent years, most of the relevant studies have indicated that the intriguing action video game intervention could significantly improve the dyslexics' reading abilities, but its underlying mechanism remains unclear. Based on the visual magnocellular deficit theory, the possible internal mechanisms regarding the positive influence of playing action video games on reading efficiency could be explained from the aspects of visual spatial attention, cross-sensory attention shifting and visual motor processing. Based on this theory framework, future research could not only examine the internal mechanisms of the effect of action video game training on reading skills, but also develop relevant intervention programs which are more suitable for the dyslexic readers.
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2022-11-24
Abstract：
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and developmental dyslexia (DD) are two common neurodevelopmental disorders in children, and the prevalence of the comorbidity between these two disorders varies from 25% to 48%. This comorbidity not only exposes children to cognitive, behavioral, and psychological impairments but also brings a heavy burden to their families, schools, and society. Hence, intervention for children with comorbidity between ADHD and DD is extremely important and necessary. Based on the hypothesis regarding the pathological mechanism of this comorbidity, previous intervention studies can be divided into the following two categories: 1) Intervention programs based on the phenotype hypothesis, such as pharmacological intervention, reading intervention, and combination of the two interventions. The transfer effect and retention effect of these interventions need to be further studied in depth; 2) Intervention programs based on the common deficit hypothesis, such as intervention focusing on processing speed, one of the core common cognitive deficits between ADHD and DD. Preliminary benefits have been found in this intervention; however, only few related studies can be found. More studies are required to systematically explore relevant intervention effects. Finally, the present review reflected on some major issues and implications of the current interventions for children with comorbidity between ADHD and DD.
Peer Review Status:
Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2021-03-05
Abstract： Chinese children with developmental dyslexia (DD) have been found to show a deficit in processing multi-elements in a variety of visual tasks parallelly. Nevertheless, the potential mechanisms of this visual simultaneous processing deficit and its relation to the reading ability still remain unclear. The ability of simultaneously processes multi-character strings is restricted by different cognitive components, including perceptual processing speed, visual short-term memory capacity, selective spatial attention distribution pattern, and the ability to inhibit distractors. Therefore, this article attempted to explore the potential mechanisms underlying the visual simultaneous processing in Chinese children with DD in the framework of the theory of visual attention (TVA). Two experiments are conducted to investigate the fundamental cognitive components regarding the visual simultaneous processing skill, with further examining the relationship between these components and the Chinese reading ability from developmental perspective. 43 Chinese children with DD and 46 chronological-age matched children with normal reading ability are recruited, and the two groups respectively include students from high and low grades in primary schools for the purpose of probing into the developmental changes in these TVA-based components of the visual simultaneous processing. The two experiments separately utilize high-frequency Chinese characters as verbal materials and the symbols as nonverbal materials. A modified combined theory of visual attention (CombiTVA) paradigm is employed to collect participants’ performances during the multi-element processing. Based on the response accuracy in each level of CombiTVA task, the four parameters including processing speed (C), visual short-term memory storage (K), attentional weight (ω), and irrelevant inhibition (α) are estimated through TVA model. We first compare the four TVA parameters between groups and grades, and then conduct hierarchical regression analyses to examine the contributions of possible impaired TVA parameters of reading difficulty. The results of the two experiments illustrate that the DDs from high and low grades both exhibit reduced perceptual processing speed comparing to the controls during processing multiple elements in parallel, with a trend of developmental decrease in this component deficit. Moreover, significant differences in the selective spatial attention distribution pattern between dyslexic and normal readers are only present in Experiment 1 with Chinese characters as the stimuli rather than in Experiment 2 with the nonverbal symbols as the stimuli. In details, during multi-processing of Chinese characters, a balanced pattern in attentional distribution is observed in DDs from both two grade groups; while the attentional weight of normal readers develops from right-lateralized to balanced patterns. Further hierarchical regression analyses reveals that the impaired components of visual simultaneous processing are separately associated with different levels of Chinese reading, the component of perceptual processing speed independently and effectively accounts for the variance of the sentence reading performance regardless of material properties, while the component of selective spatial attention distribution pattern is related to the single-character reading speed. These findings unfold the modulation of language specificity of Chinese to the cognitive deficits of DDs to some extent. This research is helpful to deepen our understanding of the internal mechanism of the visual simultaneous processing deficit in Chinese dyslexic children, and contribute to designing relevant intervention targeting visual simultaneous processing skills to improve reading efficiency in the dyslexics.
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