A demonstration that task difficulty can confound the interpretation of lateral differences in brain activation between typical and dyslexic readers

Abstract

Dyslexic readers (DRs) manifest atypical patterns of brain activity, which may be attributed to aberrant neural connectivity and/or an attempt to activate compensatory pathways. This paper evaluates whether differences in brain activation patterns between DRs and typical readers (TRs) are confounded by task difficulty. Eight DRs and eight TRs matched for age, sex, and nonverbal IQ performed pseudoword rhyming tasks at two levels of difficulty during magnetoencephalography. Task difficulty varied with the number of successive target pseudowords presented before the test pseudoword. Regions of interest were: the temporoparietal area (TPA), the ventral occipital temporal area (VOT), and the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Activity was analysed for the 660-ms period after test pseudoword onset. During the discrepant performance condition left hemispheric TPA activation increased across time for TRs, but not DRs, and IFG bihemispheric activation was greater in TRs by the end of the trial. During the equivalent performance condition no group differences in TPA or IFG activation were found. We argue that these results indicate that direct comparison of DR versus TR brain activity is confounded when DRs are more challenged than TRs. This highlights the importance of equating reading group performance during neuroimaging of reading-related tasks.

Keywords:

• Reading disability
• Task difficulty
• Magnetoencephalography
• Temporoparietal area
• Inferior frontal gyrus

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a International Dyslexia Association Predoctoral Award and an NIH predoctoral award to JMF, by a National Science Foundation Center of Excellence for Learning Science and Technology Award (investigator: JL), and internal Boston University funds (Spring and UROP awards to JL); and by NS046565 to RF.