Developmental and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, Department of General Psychology, University of Padua, Padova, 35131, Italy.
Child Psychopathology Unit, Scientific Institute "E. Medea", Bosisio Parini, Lecco, 23842, Italy.
Sci Rep. 2017 Dec 12;7(1):17462. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-17626-1.
Individuals perceive the wor(l)d hierarchically. Firsty, the global visual scene is processed by the right hemisphere, and later, the local features are perceived by the left hemisphere. Based on this hierarchical analysis, humans evolved unique communication ability: reading. However, for about 10% of people reading acquisition is extremely difficult, they are affected by a heritable neurodevelopmental disorder called dyslexia. Differences in perceiving the wor(l)d might be one of the causes of reading disabilities. Here we show multiple causal links between the global before local perception and learning to read. Five behavioral experiments in 353 children reveal that: (i) a local before global perception characterizes three independent groups of unselected children with dyslexia; (ii) two global before local perception trainings improve reading skills in children with dyslexia; and stringently (iii) pre-reading local before global perception longitudinally predicts future poor readers. Challenging the uni-causal and left-lateralized phonological explanation of dyslexia, our results demonstrate that learning to read depends also on an efficient right neural network for the global analysis of the visual scene. These results provide new insights in learning strategies and pave the way for early identification and possible prevention programs.
个体以层级方式感知世界。首先，全局视觉场景由右半球处理，随后，左半球感知局部特征。基于这种层级分析，人类进化出了独特的交流能力：阅读。然而，约有 10%的人阅读能力的习得极其困难，他们患有一种遗传性神经发育障碍，称为阅读障碍。感知世界的差异可能是阅读障碍的原因之一。在这里，我们展示了全局先于局部感知与阅读学习之间的多种因果关系。在 353 名儿童中进行的五项行为实验表明：（i）局部先于全局感知是具有阅读障碍的三个独立的未选择儿童群体的特征；（ii）两种全局先于局部的感知训练可以提高阅读障碍儿童的阅读技能；（iii）严格来说，阅读前的局部先于全局感知可以预测未来的阅读困难。我们的结果挑战了阅读障碍的单一因果关系和左偏侧化语音解释，表明阅读学习还依赖于有效的右神经网络来进行视觉场景的全局分析。这些结果为学习策略提供了新的见解，并为早期识别和可能的预防计划铺平了道路。
