TITLE:
Dyslexia and the Integration of Sensory Cues into Motor Action
AUTHORS:
José A. Barela, Paulo Barbosa de Freitas, André Rocha Viana, Milena Razuk
KEYWORDS:
Vision, Somatosensory, Posture, Perception, Postural Control
JOURNAL NAME:
Psychology,
Vol.5 No.16,
October
30,
2014
ABSTRACT: Besides
difficulties in mastering literacy, dyslexic children also show poor postural
control that might be related to how sensory cues coming from different sensory
channels are integrated and trigger proper motor activity. The purpose of this
study was to review the body of literature about the functioning of the
postural control system in dyslexic children and understand how they use
sensory information to produce motor actions. It has been demonstrated that
dyslexic children sway more than non-dyslexic ones. Studies have shown that
although manipulation of vision and somatosensory information provided by a
moving room and a moving touch bar, respectively, induced correspondent body
sway in dyslexic children, their postural responses to such manipulations were
less coherent as compared to non-dyslexic children. When dyslexic children
applied higher force on the moving bar, however, coherence between body sway
and sensory manipulations was similar for dyslexic and non-dyslexic children.
Finally, in the absence of peripheral visual cues, induced body sway in
dyslexic children was temporally delayed regarding visual stimulus. Taken
together, these results indicate that poor postural control in dyslexic
children is related to impairments in the manner sensory information is
acquired and used to produce postural responses. The need of dyslexic children
to apply more force on the touch bar to improve coherence between sensory
stimulus and body sway, together with the fact that in conditions in which visual
cues were less informative, dyslexic children took longer to process sensory
stimuli and produce motor responses, suggests that dyslexic children are more
dependent on the quality of sensory cues.