Action video games and posterior parietal cortex neuromodulation enhance both attention and reading in adults with developmental dyslexia.

The impact of action video games on reading performance has been already demonstrated in individuals with and without neurodevelopmental disorders. The combination of action video games and posterior parietal cortex neuromodulation by a transcranial random noise stimulation could enhance brain plasticity, improving attentional control and reading skills also in adults with developmental dyslexia. In a double blind randomized controlled trial, 20 young adult nonaction video game players with developmental dyslexia were trained for 15 h with action video games.

Visuo-spatial attention deficit in children with reading difficulties.

Although developmental reading disorders (developmental dyslexia) have been mainly associated with auditory-phonological deficits, recent longitudinal and training studies have shown a possible causal role of visuo-attentional skills in reading acquisition. Indeed, visuo-attentional mechanisms could be involved in the orthographic processing of the letter string and the graphemic parsing that precede the grapheme-to-phoneme mapping. Here, we used a simple paper-and-pencil task composed of three labyrinths to measure visuo-spatial attention in a large sample of primary school children (n = 398).

Action Video Games Enhance Attentional Control and Phonological Decoding in Children with Developmental Dyslexia.

Reading acquisition is extremely difficult for about 5% of children because they are affected by a heritable neurobiological disorder called developmental dyslexia (DD). Intervention studies can be used to investigate the causal role of neurocognitive deficits in DD. Recently, it has been proposed that action video games (AVGs)-enhancing attentional control-could improve perception and working memory as well as reading skills.

Local perception impairs the lexical reading route.

Human perception of a visual scene is hierarchically organized. Such rapid, albeit coarse, global processing allows people to create a useful context in which local details can be successively allocated. Lack of the typical hierarchical global-to-local visual processing is longitudinally predictive of future reading difficulties in pre-readers, which suggests that an atypical local perception can interfere with reading skill acquisition.

Caffeine improves text reading and global perception.

Background: Reading is a unique human skill. Several brain networks involved in this complex skill mainly involve the left hemisphere language areas. Nevertheless, nonlinguistic networks found in the right hemisphere also seem to be involved in sentence and text reading.

Cognitive development attenuates audiovisual distraction and promotes the selection of task-relevant perceptual saliency during visual search on complex scenes.

Searching for a target while avoiding distraction is a core function of selective attention involving both voluntary and reflexive mechanisms. Here, for the first time, we investigated the development of the interplay between voluntary and reflexive mechanisms of selective attention from childhood to early adulthood. We asked 6-, 10-, and 20-year-old participants to search for a target presented in one hemifield of a complex scene, preceded by a task-irrelevant auditory cue on either the target side (valid), the opposite side (invalid), or both sides (neutral).

The Effect of Lipoic Acid Therapy on Cognitive Functioning in Patients with Alzheimer's Disease.

Diabetes mellitus (DM) is an important risk factor for Alzheimer's disease (AD). Most diabetic patients have insulin resistance (IR) that is associated with compensatory hyperinsulinemia, one of the mechanisms suggested for increased AD risk in patients with DM. Alpha-lipoic acid (ALA) is a disulfide molecule with antioxidant properties that has positive effects on glucose metabolism and IR.