Around one in ten children in the UK have dyslexia, a developmental condition which means that they struggle to learn to read. It often causes difficulties in spelling too.
Reading and spelling involve mapping what we see on a page to correspond to spoken language and meaning. So, reading difficulties could at least in part be caused by differences in how the brain processes visual information (how the brain makes sense of what we see).
One visual skill that has been found to differ between people with and without dyslexia time and time again is the ability to perceive motion, which essentially means how we work out the direction of moving objects.
In a display of dots moving in different directions, people with dyslexia tend to need more dots to be moving in the same direction in order to accurately judge the overall direction. But until now, we have not really understood why this ability is affected. We wanted to try to find out, to get a better understanding of how the brain develops differently in children with dyslexia.
Read the full article on The Conversation website, co-authored by Professor Gaia Scerif in Department of Experimental Psychology.
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