Learning to read involves tricking the brain

In the experimental sequence, a pair of identical animals (e.g. horses) is preceded on the screen by a pair of mirror-image letters (b and d), or, in the control condition, a pair of non-mirror-image letters (f and t). 

The participant must decide in each case whether the two items (letters or animals) are identical or not. 

Credit: CNRS /Université Paris Descartes, Sorbonne-Paris-Cité /Université de Caen Basse-Normandie

While reading, children and adults alike must avoid confusing mirror-image letters (like b/d or p/q). Why is it difficult to differentiate these letters?

When learning to read, our brain must be able to inhibit the mirror-generalization process, a mechanism that facilitates the recognition of identical objects regardless of their orientation, but also prevents the brain from differentiating letters that are different but symmetrical.

A study conducted by the researchers of the Laboratoire de Psychologie du Développement et de l'Education de l'Enfant (CNRS / Université Paris Descartes / Université de Caen Basse-Normandie) is available on the website of the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (Online First Articles).

In recent years, many studies on the process of learning to read have been based on the neuronal recycling hypothesis: the reuse of old brain mechanisms in a new adaptive role - a kind of "biological trick."

Specifically, neurons that are originally dedicated to the rapid identification of objects in the environment, through the mirror-generalization process, are "repurposed" during childhood to specialize in the visual recognition of letters and words.

In this study, the researchers showed 80 young adults pairs of images, first two letters and then two animals, asking them to determine whether they were identical.

The readers consistently spent more time determining that two animal images, when preceded by mirror-image letters, were indeed identical.

This increase in response time is called "negative priming": the readers had to inhibit the mirror-generalization process in order to distinguish letters like b/d or p/q. They then needed a little more time to reactivate this strategy when it became useful again to quickly identify animals.

Learning to read involves tricking the brain

The reader must learn to distinguish mirror-image letters (b and d) on the computer screen separated by a target fixation cross (+). 

Credit: CNRS/Université Paris Descartes, Sorbonne-Paris-Cité /Université de Caen Basse-Normandie

These results show that even adults need to inhibit the mirror-generalization process to avoid reading errors.

Children must therefore learn to inhibit this strategy when learning to read. A failure of cognitive inhibition during the recycling of visual neurons in the brain could thus be a factor in dyslexia, a direction worth exploring, in light of these findings.

More information: "The cost of blocking the mirror-generalization process in reading: Evidence for the role of inhibitory control in discriminating letters with lateral mirror-image counterparts." Grégoire Borst, Emmanuel Ahr, Margot Roell, and Olivier Houdé. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (Online First Articles), 23 May 2014. DOI: 10.3758/s13423-014-0663-9

Bob Hopkins: Played an early role in helping adults learn to read

British actor Bob Hoskins, who recently died aged 71, was the star of several big-screen blockbusters movies as a mobster or as the sidekick to Roger Rabbit but his early role in a BBC adult education series made a different kind of impact.

"On the move, on the move, we're on the move again," crooned 1970s cabaret-poppers The Dooleys over the opening credits.

There followed 10 minutes of clips and sketches aimed at helping adults overcome literacy problems. It was an unlikely setting from which to launch a Hollywood career.

But each episode of the 1976 BBC series On the Move featured a running storyline in which the late Bob Hoskins appeared as Alf Hunt, a furniture removal man who had difficulty reading and writing.

A proud but sympathetic character, Alf would open up to his friend Bert, played by Donald Gee, about his fears and frustrations.

His progress, as he sought help, attracted a huge following well beyond the show's target audience.

Up to 17 million people watched the Sunday tea-time programme, according to George Auckland, who would subsequently take charge of the BBC's adult education programming.

It was Alf's human drama and, specifically, Hoskins's captivating performance that drew them in, said Auckland.

A national campaign to tackle illiteracy was boosted by the series. On the Monday after each episode, says Auckland, "there would be queues around the block" at adult literacy centres.

"There's a strong argument that this makes Hoskins the best educator Britain has ever produced" but this is an exaggeration and Hopkins motive for joining the programme may have more to do with trying to get on the ladder to fame and fortune, which he eventually managed to do.

What we can say is that the broadcasting and media services can go a long way to normalising and helping to overcome the difficulties that some adults have when reading.

The media can also push forward willing celebrities who can captivate audiences and in doing so encourage the expansion and development of adult education in everyday life.

We are sadden by the death of Bob Hopkins as we are saddened by the passing of all men /women. We congratulate and celebrate his success in the film industry and we thank him for the part he played in helping adult education.

Babies Cannot Read! NYU Study Confirms

Can babies learn to read? While parents use DVDs and other media in an attempt to teach their infants to read, these tools don't instill reading skills in babies, a study by researchers at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development has found.

"While we cannot say with full assurance that infants at this age cannot learn printed words, our results make clear they did not learn printed words from the baby media product that was tested," says Susan Neuman, a professor in NYU Steinhardt's Department of Teaching and Learning and the study's senior author.

However, Neuman adds, there was one undeniable effect of these products, on parents.

In exit interviews, there was the mistaken belief among parents that their babies were learning to read and that their children had benefited from the program in some areas of vocabulary development.

Susan Neuman

"It's clear that parents have great confidence in the impact of these products on their children," Neuman explains. "However, our study indicates this sentiment is misplaced."

In their study, which appears in the Journal of Educational Psychology, the researchers examined 117 infants, aged nine to 18 months, who were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups.

Children in the treatment condition received a baby media product, which included DVDs, word and picture flashcards, and flip books to be used daily over a seven-month period; children in the control condition did not receive these materials from the researchers.

Over the course of seven months, the researchers conducted a home visit, four laboratory visits, and monthly assessments of language development.

To test children's emerging skills in the laboratory, the researchers examined the capacity to recognize letter names, letter sounds, vocabulary, words identified on sight, and comprehension.

A combination of eye-tracking tasks and standardized measures were used to study outcomes at each stage of development.

Using a state-of-the art eye-tracking technology, which follows even the slightest eye movements, the researchers were able to closely monitor how the infants distributed their attention and how they shifted their gaze from one location to another when shown specific words and phrases.

The results, which included criterion and standardized measures of emergent and early reading skills, showed no differences between the infants exposed to baby media and the control group on 13 of the 14 assessments.

The only assessment that showed a difference was parents' beliefs that their child was learning new words despite countervailing evidence from a standardized measure indicating no differences between groups.

More Information: Can Babies Learn to Read? A Randomized Trial of Baby Media. Neuman, Susan B.; Kaefer, Tanya; Pinkham, Ashley; Strouse, Gabrielle Journal of Educational Psychology, Feb 24 , 2014, No Pagination Specified. doi: 10.1037/a0035937

Dyslexia: Action video games help people with Dyslexia learn to read

In addition to their trouble with reading, people with dyslexia also have greater difficulty than typical readers do when it comes to managing competing sensory cues, according to a study reported February 13 in Current Biology.

The findings suggest that action video games might improve literacy skills in those with dyslexia, which represent five to ten percent of the population.

"Imagine you are having a conversation with someone when suddenly you hear your name uttered behind you," says Vanessa Harrar of the University of Oxford.

"Your attention shifts from the person you are talking to—the visual—to the sound behind you. This is an example of a cross-sensory shift of attention."

"We found that shifting attention from visual to auditory stimuli is particularly difficult for people who have dyslexia compared to good readers."

In fact, researchers already knew that people with dyslexia had some challenges with auditory processing in addition to their visual impairments.

New evidence had also begun to link multisensory integration and dyslexia to the same parts of the brain.

That evidence, together with Harrar's own personal challenges with reading and writing, prompted her and her colleagues to conduct one of the first investigations of how people with dyslexia process multisensory stimuli.

Participants in the study were asked to push a button as quickly as possible when they heard a sound, saw a dim flash, or experienced both together.

The speed with which they pressed the buttons was recorded and analyzed.

While everyone was fastest when the same type of stimuli repeated itself, the data showed that people with dyslexia were particularly slow at pressing the button when a sound-only trial followed a visual-only trial.

In other words, they showed "sluggish attention shifting," particularly when asked to shift their attention from a flash of light to a sound.

While the researchers say further study is needed, they suggest based on the findings that dyslexia training programs should take this asymmetry into account.

"We think that people with dyslexia might learn associations between letters and their sounds faster if they first hear the sound and then see the corresponding letter or word," Harrar says.

Of course, traditional approaches to reading, in which letters are first seen and then heard, do just the opposite.

Harrar's team goes on to propose a unique, nonverbal approach to improve reading and writing with action video games.

"We propose that training people with dyslexia to shift attention quickly from visual to auditory stimuli and back—such as with a video game, where attention is constantly shifting focus—might also improve literacy.

Action video games have been shown to improve multitasking skills and might also be beneficial in improving the speed with which people with dyslexia shift attention from one task, or sense, to another."

More information: Current Biology, Harrar et al.: "Multisensory integration and attention in developmental dyslexia." dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.01.029

Babies can read each other’s moods, study finds

Research shows that babies can understand each others emotional signals at five months of age. 

These baby boys are cousins - the one on the left is four months old and the one on the right is five months. 

Credit: Image courtesy of Brigham Young University

Although it may seem difficult for adults to understand what an infant is feeling, a new study from Brigham Young University finds that it's so easy a baby could do it.

Psychology professor Ross Flom's study, published in the academic journal Infancy, shows that infants can recognize each other's emotions by five months of age.

This study comes on the heels of other significant research by Flom on infants' ability to understand the moods of dogs, monkeys and classical music.

Ross Flom

"Newborns can't verbalize to their mom or dad that they are hungry or tired, so the first way they communicate is through affect or emotion," says Flom.

"Thus it is not surprising that in early development, infants learn to discriminate changes in affect."

Infants can match emotion in adults at seven months and familiar adults at six months. In order to test infant's perception of their peer's emotions, Flom and his team of researchers tested a baby's ability to match emotional infant vocalizations with a paired infant facial expression.

"We found that 5 month old infants can match their peer's positive and negative vocalizations with the appropriate facial expression," says Flom.

"This is the first study to show a matching ability with an infant this young. They are exposed to affect in a peer's voice and face which is likely more familiar to them because it's how they themselves convey or communicate positive and negative emotions."

In the study, infants were seated in front of two monitors. One of the monitors displayed video of a happy, smiling baby while the other monitor displayed video of a second sad, frowning baby.

When audio was played of a third happy baby, the infant participating in the study looked longer to the video of the baby with positive facial expressions.

The infant also was able to match negative vocalizations with video of the sad frowning baby. The audio recordings were from a third baby and not in sync with the lip movements of the babies in either video.

"These findings add to our understanding of early infant development by reiterating the fact that babies are highly sensitive to and comprehend some level of emotion," says Flom.

"Babies learn more in their first 2 1/2 years of life than they do the rest of their lifespan, making it critical to examine how and what young infants learn and how this helps them learn other things."

Flom co-authored the study of 40 infants from Utah and Florida with Professor Lorraine Bahrick from Florida International University.

Flom's next step in studying infant perception is to run the experiments with a twist: test whether babies could do this at even younger ages if instead they were watching and hearing clips of themselves.

And while the talking twin babies in this popular YouTube clip are older, it's still a lot of fun to watch them babble at each other.

Journal Reference:
Mariana Vaillant-Molina, Lorraine E. Bahrick, Ross Flom. Young Infants Match Facial and Vocal Emotional Expressions of Other Infants. Infancy, 2013; DOI: 10.1111/infa.12017

Dyslexia: Learning to Read Music

Dyslexia can be more than simply a problem with words. Music students often find it difficult to understand musical notation, especially when they are trying to read sheet music and play their instrument a the same time.

Dyslexia can be more than just a problem with letters and words. Many talented music students run into problems when they try to learn to read sheet music.

Just as they experiences problems with words in print, the dyslexic musician may see a baffling array of lines and circles, with note symbols jumping around and the lines of the staff wavering and shifting.

Confusion about letters leads to disorientation and frustration; confusion about musical notation has the same result.

The people of Davis Symbol Mastery, the process of modeling symbols in clay, believe they can provide an effective solution.

Their solution is to form each musical symbol in three dimensions, using clay.

Thus, the participatory and sensory input will help the student develop a full understanding of the meaning of each symbol.

NB: Read more about this at The Dyslexic Reader

How to Motivate Kids to Read: Tips - Andrea Davis Pinkney video

Children's book author Andrea Davis Pinkney, who has children with learning disabilities, shares fantastic tips about how to motivate young people to read. For more information and free resources, please visit NCLD's Dyslexia page.

Dyslexia - TTRS Website: Touch-Type, Read and Spell

TTRS is a computer based course for children and adults who have spelling and reading difficulties, dyslexia and other learning differences.

Now in it's 20th year, TTRS has helped thousands of students to touch-type, read and spell and is used in hundreds of schools and institutions in Great Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand and other parts of the world

Learning is promoted by a unique multi-sensory approach:

A systematic programme of seeing, listening, speaking and typing

Seeing the words written on the screen as they are typed out

Hearing the words pronounced as they are typed

Student and computer are interactive allowing for immediate self correction of errors and feedback of results

The structured ttrs course is finely graded in modules and levels building from words to sentences

With each successful module completed the student is encouraged to progress further

Students develop their own learning speed, therefore there are no peer group pressures

ttrs gives focus and support for a positive learning experience

Researchers 'read' words in brain signals

U.S. researchers say they've translated brain signals into words, a step toward allowing severely paralyzed people to use their thoughts to "talk."

University of Utah scientists translated signals generated by the brain into words using grids of micro-electrodes implanted beneath the skull but atop the brain, a university release said Monday.

"We have been able to decode spoken words using only signals from the brain with a device that has promise for long-term use in paralyzed patients who cannot now speak," Bradley Greger, an assistant professor of bioengineering, said.

The study used a new kind of non-penetrating micro-electrode that sits on the brain without poking into it. Because the micro-electrodes do not penetrate brain matter, they are considered safe to place on speech areas of the brain.

The scientists placed grids of tiny micro-electrodes over speech centers in the brain of a volunteer with severe epileptic seizures. Using the micro-electrodes, the scientists recorded brain signals as the patient repeatedly read each of 10 words that might be useful to a paralyzed person: yes, no, hot, cold, hungry, thirsty, hello, goodbye, more and less.

When they compared any two brain signals, such as those generated as the volunteer said the words "yes" and "no," they were able to distinguish brain signals for each word 76 percent to 90 percent of the time.

People who eventually could benefit from a wireless device that converts thoughts into computer-spoken spoken words include those paralyzed by stroke, Lou Gehrig's disease and trauma, Greger said.

Howard Engel: The Writer who forgot how to Read

Howard Engel is an accomplished Canadian novelist. One day, Engel suffered a stroke that left him with alexia sine (Latin for without) agraphia. Also known as 'acquired Dyslexia' and in this case it was 'acquired' during a stroke.

Alexia is a condition which prevents a person from being able to read written words, without a major effort, while retaining their ability to write. In alexia or 'acquired dyslexia' the brain can no longer process text and the meaning of text, as a fixed reference.

Engel was puzzled by the fact that he could still write, but shortly after writing a piece of text, he was unable to read it. So Engel devised a way to use this remaining ability to regain his literacy.

Cartoonist and animator Levni Yilmaz produced this video for National Public Radio explaining how Engel was able to do it.

Visual Processing 'Hinders Ability' To Read Body Language

Visual Processing 'Hinders Ability' To Read Body Language: Autism Study

With around half a million people in the UK affected by autism, the Durham University study suggests visual processing problems could be contributing to their day-to-day difficulties with social interaction.

The research showed that adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) found it difficult to identify emotions, such as anger or happiness, from short video clips of body movements without seeing faces or hearing sound.

Those adults who struggled most with this task also performed poorly when asked to detect the direction in which a group of dots moved coherently on a screen, thought to be due to visual processing problems.

People with autism often have difficulty in attributing mental states to others and this is thought to be one of the main causes of their struggle to know how other people feel. The Durham study, published in the academic journal Neuropsychologia, suggests visual processing problems may also be a contributing factor.

Dyslexia: How Dogs can Help Children read

This program helps kids build skills by reading to non-judgmental furry friends.

Click on the picture to see the video or click in this link