Developmental dyslexia and vision

Abstract

Patrick Quercia,1 Léonard Feiss,2 Carine Michel31Department of Ophthalmology, University Hospital, Dijon, France; 2Office of Ophthalmology, Beaune, France; 3University of Burgundy, Dijon, INSERM U1093, Cognition, Action et Plasticité Sensorimotrice, Dijon, FranceAbstract: Developmental dyslexia affects almost 10% of school-aged children and represents a significant public health problem. Its etiology is unknown. The consistent presence of phonological difficulties combined with an inability to manipulate language sounds and the grapheme–phoneme conversion is widely acknowledged. Numerous scientific studies have also documented the presence of eye movement anomalies and deficits of perception of low contrast, low spatial frequency, and high frequency temporal visual information in dyslexics. Anomalies of visual attention with short visual attention spans have also been demonstrated in a large number of cases. Spatial orientation is also affected in dyslexics who manifest a preference for spatial attention to the right. This asymmetry may be so pronounced that it leads to a veritable neglect of space on the left side. The evaluation of treatments proposed to dyslexics whether speech or oriented towards the visual anomalies remains fragmentary. The advent of new explanatory theories, notably cerebellar, magnocellular, or proprioceptive, is an incentive for ophthalmologists to enter the world of multimodal cognition given the importance of the eye's visual input.Keywords: reading, ocular motility, dyslexia, neglect, spatial representation