Neurophysiology in preschool improves behavioral prediction of reading ability throughout primary school.

Background: More struggling readers could profit from additional help at the beginning of reading acquisition if dyslexia prediction were more successful. Currently, prediction is based only on behavioral assessment of early phonological processing deficits associated with dyslexia, but it might be improved by adding brain-based measures.

Methods: In a 5-year longitudinal study of children with (n = 21) and without (n = 23) familial risk for dyslexia, we tested whether neurophysiological measures of automatic phoneme and tone deviance processing obtained in kindergarten would improve prediction of reading over behavioral measures alone.

Impaired tuning of a fast occipito-temporal response for print in dyslexic children learning to read.

Developmental dyslexia is defined as a disorder of learning to read. It is thus critical to examine the neural processes that impair learning to read during the early phase of reading acquisition, before compensatory mechanisms are adapted by older readers with dyslexia. Using electroencephalography-based event-related imaging, we investigated how tuning of visual activity for print advances in the same children before and after initial reading training in school.

Coarse neural tuning for print peaks when children learn to read.

Adult readers exhibit increased fast N1 activity to wordlike strings in their event-related brain potential. This increase has been linked to visual expertise for print, implying a protracted monotonic development. We investigated the development of coarse neural tuning for print by studying children longitudinally before and after learning to read, and comparing them to skilled adults.

Face perception is modulated by sexual preference.

Face perception is mediated by a distributed neural system in the human brain . The response to faces is modulated by cognitive factors such as attention, visual imagery, and emotion ; however, the effects of gender and sexual orientation are currently unknown. We used fMRI to test whether subjects would respond more to their sexually preferred faces and predicted such modulation in the reward circuitry.