People struggling with dyslexia have trouble reading and handling "competing sensory cues"; playing action video games could help improve these individuals' conditions.
"Imagine you are having a conversation with someone when suddenly you hear your name uttered behind you," Vanessa Harrar of the University of Oxford, said in a Cell Press news release. "Your attention shifts from the person you are talking to-the visual-to the sound behind you. This is an example of a cross-sensory shift of attention. We found that shifting attention from visual to auditory stimuli is particularly difficult for people who have dyslexia compared to good readers."
Dyslexics make up between five and 10 percent of the population. Researchers have known dyslexia affects auditory processing as well as reading skills; new research links "multisensory integration and dyslexia" to the same region of the brain.
The team asked study participants to push a button as fast as they could when they experienced a sound, a flash of light, or both. All of the participants had the quickest reaction when the same stimuli was repeated twice, but the researchers found dyslexic participants were especially slow to push the button when a "sound-only trial followed a visual-only trial."
"In other words, they showed 'sluggish attention shifting,' particularly when asked to shift their attention from a flash of light to a sound," the news release reported.
Further research is needed, but the study suggests asymmetry should be taken into account when it comes to dyslexia training programs.
"We think that people with dyslexia might learn associations between letters and their sounds faster if they first hear the sound and then see the corresponding letter or word," Harrar said.
The researchers believe action video games could be powerful tools in helping those with dyslexia improve their reading and writing skills.
"We propose that training people with dyslexia to shift attention quickly from visual to auditory stimuli and back-such as with a video game, where attention is constantly shifting focus-might also improve literacy. Action video games have been shown to improve multitasking skills and might also be beneficial in improving the speed with which people with dyslexia shift attention from one task, or sense, to another," Harrar said.
