The Reading Brain

1. The Reading Brain Jenny Thomson HT100 1st November, 2010

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

3. What is reading?

4. Reading is… • A complex activity

5. Ace

7. Reading is… • A complex activity • Not natural

8. Reading is… • A complex activity • Not natural • A different set of demands across languages moikka

9. 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?

10. 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

11. So… We  psychology! But…

12. 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

13. 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

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

15. 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”

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

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

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

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

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

22. 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

23. Luck, Woodman & Vogel, 2000

24. 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

25. Study design

26. Non-linear, experience-dependent plasticity Results

27. 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!