Action video games and posterior parietal cortex neuromodulation enhance both attention and reading in adults with developmental dyslexia.

The impact of action video games on reading performance has been already demonstrated in individuals with and without neurodevelopmental disorders. The combination of action video games and posterior parietal cortex neuromodulation by a transcranial random noise stimulation could enhance brain plasticity, improving attentional control and reading skills also in adults with developmental dyslexia. In a double blind randomized controlled trial, 20 young adult nonaction video game players with developmental dyslexia were trained for 15 h with action video games. Half of the participants were stimulated with bilateral transcranial random noise stimulation on the posterior parietal cortex during the action video game training, whereas the others were in the placebo (i.e. sham) condition. Word text reading, pseudowords decoding, and temporal attention (attentional blink), as well as electroencephalographic activity during the attentional blink, were measured before and after the training. The action video game + transcranial random noise stimulation group showed temporal attention, word text reading, and pseudoword decoding enhancements and P300 amplitude brain potential changes. The enhancement in temporal attention performance was related with the efficiency in pseudoword decoding improvement. Our results demonstrate that the combination of action video game training with parietal neuromodulation increases the efficiency of visual attention deployment, probably reshaping goal-directed and stimulus-driven fronto-parietal attentional networks interplay in young adults with neurodevelopmental conditions.

Action Video Games Enhance Attentional Control and Phonological Decoding in Children with Developmental Dyslexia.

Reading acquisition is extremely difficult for about 5% of children because they are affected by a heritable neurobiological disorder called developmental dyslexia (DD). Intervention studies can be used to investigate the causal role of neurocognitive deficits in DD. Recently, it has been proposed that action video games (AVGs)-enhancing attentional control-could improve perception and working memory as well as reading skills. In a partial crossover intervention study, we investigated the effect of AVG and non-AVG training on attentional control using a conjunction visual search task in children with DD. We also measured the non-alphanumeric rapid automatized naming (RAN), phonological decoding and word reading before and after AVG and non-AVG training. After both video game training sessions no effect was found in non-alphanumeric RAN and in word reading performance. However, after only 12 h of AVG training the attentional control was improved (i.e., the set-size slopes were flatter in visual search) and phonological decoding speed was accelerated. Crucially, attentional control and phonological decoding speed were increased only in DD children whose video game score was highly efficient after the AVG training. We demonstrated that only an efficient AVG training induces a plasticity of the fronto-parietal attentional control linked to a selective phonological decoding improvement in children with DD.

Local perception impairs the lexical reading route.

Human perception of a visual scene is hierarchically organized. Such rapid, albeit coarse, global processing allows people to create a useful context in which local details can be successively allocated. Lack of the typical hierarchical global-to-local visual processing is longitudinally predictive of future reading difficulties in pre-readers, which suggests that an atypical local perception can interfere with reading skill acquisition. Global and local Navon tasks were used to induce a transient perceptual priming before a reading-aloud task. We tested the effect of an atypical local perception on lexical and sublexical reading routes in typical adult readers. Local (vs. global) priming resulted in a slower phonological access to irregular, relative to regular, words. By contrast, pseudoword reading was not affected by local (vs. global) perceptual priming. Our findings demonstrate that, in typical adult readers, local priming impairs the fast processing of the letter string useful for lexical reading.

Caffeine improves text reading and global perception.

BACKGROUND: Reading is a unique human skill. Several brain networks involved in this complex skill mainly involve the left hemisphere language areas. Nevertheless, nonlinguistic networks found in the right hemisphere also seem to be involved in sentence and text reading. These areas do not deal with phonological information, but are involved in verbal and nonverbal pattern information processing. The right hemisphere is responsible for global processing of a scene, which is needed for developing reading skills. AIMS: Caffeine seems to affect global pattern processing specifically. Consequently, our aim was to discover if it could enhance text reading skill. METHODS: In two mechanistic studies (n=24 and n=53), we tested several reading skills, global and local perception, alerting, spatial attention and executive functions, as well as rapid automatised naming and phonological memory, using a double-blind, within-subjects, repeated-measures design in typical young adult readers. RESULTS: A single dose of 200 mg caffeine improved global processing, without any effect on local information processing, alerting, spatial attention and executive or phonological functions. This improvement in global processing was accompanied by faster text reading speed of meaningful sentences, whereas single word/pseudoword or pseudoword text reading abilities were not affected. These effects of caffeine on reading ability were enhanced by mild sleep deprivation. CONCLUSIONS: These findings show that a small quantity of caffeine could improve global processing and text reading skills in adults.