It is the egg, not the chicken; dorsal visual deficits present in dyslexia are not present in illiterate adults

Abstract

Some individuals with dyslexia demonstrate deficits in reading, visual attention, and visual processing which can be attributed to a functional failure of the magnocells in the visual system or in the dorsal visual pathway. The study examines the role of magno/dorsal function in dyslexic adults compared with normal, illiterate, and semi‐literate readers. Coherent motion and coherent form were used in Experiment 1, and the frequency doubling illusion and static‐gratings were used in Experiment 2. If a magno/dorsal deficit is demonstrated for dyslexic readers but not illiterate, semi‐literate, and normal reading adults, then the deficit cannot be attributed to reading experience. Illiterate adults performed the same as normal and semi‐literate readers in coherent motion and frequency doubling tasks, and all three groups performed better than the dyslexic readers. There was no difference between any of the groups in the coherent form or static grating tasks. Together, these studies show that illiterate and semi‐literate adults do not demonstrate a magno/dorsal deficit that is a characteristic of some sufferers of dyslexia. Therefore, magno/dorsal deficits in dyslexia are unlikely to be a consequence of failing to learn to read but rather provides evidence to suggest a causal role for reduced visual magno/dorsal processing.