The Reading Brain Jenny Thomson HT100 1 st November, 2010

Today’s session 1. Recap on what we know about reading 2. The E-M-B perspective!

What is reading?

Reading is…  A complex activity

Ace

Reading is…  A complex activity  Not natural

Reading is…  A complex activity  Not natural  A different set of demands across languages moikka

And teachers have to teach this?!  Which skills need to be taught?  When do you teach them?  Might different children need more focus on different parts of the process?

Psychology to the rescue?  Phonological sensitivity is important to early reading  Skilled reading involves a process that is less reliant on phonology exclusively, but also involves direct visual recognition  Simple view of reading Reading comprehension = Word Recognition + Listening Comprehension

So… We  psychology! But…

 It hasn’t told us everything  While psychology-informed best practice works for many, many students and 70% of struggling readers, 30% remain as “treatment resistors”  Even a minimal neuroscience background suggests that the brain is not composed of boxes and arrows

What are the options?  Psychology can step up its game  We could see if neuroscience can add some insights  Psychology and neuroscience could join forces to answer educational questions  None of the above

Psychology stepping it up 1.Accept and learn to love equifinality 2.Use its existing tools to understand phonology and reading subskills more

What about neuroscience?  And let’s remind ourselves of the critical question   While psychology-informed best practice works for many, many students and 70% of struggling readers, 30% remain as “treatment resistors”

What about neuroscience?  Post-mortem studies  Functional studies e.g. fMRI and EEG/ERP  Structural studies e.g. DTI

This is neat hypothesis…  What are the implications for identification and intervention for individuals with dyslexia?

What about neuroscience?  Post-mortem studies  Functional studies e.g. fMRI and EEG/ERP

This is also very neat…  Does this add further educational implications?  Do you see any limitations?

VWFA  What has functional fMRI told us about the visual word form area (VWFA)?

Enter ERP…  Electrical potentials generated during neurotransmission  Recorded from electrodes on surface of scalp  Time-locked signal averaging extracts very small event-related potentials from the EEG  Resulting averaged waveform is series of positive and negative deflections, called ‘peaks’, ‘waves’ or ‘components’.  The sequence of components following the stimulus reflects the sequence of neural processes triggered by the stimulus

Luck, Woodman & Vogel, 2000

Back to the VWFA ERP studies in adults have shown that within 200 ms of viewing a visual word, electrical activity recorded over left posterior inferior regions of skilled readers responds differently to visual words versus control stimuli (i.e., strings of novel letter-like characters). N170 – represents fast perceptual specialization

Study design

Results  Non-linear, experience- dependent plasticity

Tying things together  If our question is why do 30% of struggling readers not respond to instructional best-practice…  …Neuroscience and converging methodologies have burgeoning potential to help us understand developmental pathways, individual differences and response to intervention  But we’re not there yet!