Visual & Auditory Research News

JET SPECS

Helen Dudfield is a psychologist with Qinetiq, Farnborough, which is the privatised Defence Research Agency that, among other things, developed Frank Whittle’s invention of the jet engine. She was involved in a project to develop goggles that would measure the eye movements of jet fighter pilots accurately, and she thought ‘if they’ll work for jet fighter pilots, they ought to work with young children learning to read!’.

So she and John Stein started a project to develop the Qinetiq eye trackers to measure eye control in 5-8 yr old children learning to read to test John’s hypothesis that poor eye control may cause visual reading problems. This was eventually funded by the Dept for Trade and Industry in conjunction with the Dept for Education and Science to whom we are very grateful. With the greatly appreciated and crucial help of Pauline Bentote and the Hampshire LEA, the team studied nearly 300 6 yr old children starting primary school in the Hampshire area, 100 of whom they revisited 6 months later to see how they’d progressed.

Jane Edwards also examined 64 8 yr old children attending the Dyslexia Research Trust clinics in Reading. The Qinetiq eye track recording goggles had been modified for use with these young children. The aim was to correlate the children’s eye control when they were starting to learn to read with early indicators of their reading readiness and risk of later reading problems, and then to see whether their eye control at 6 predicted their reading progress 6 months later.

In accordance with John’s hypothesis, the project confirmed that the children with unstable visual fixation, ‘wobbly eyes’, particularly of the left eye, were poorer at reading and reading related tests than those with good eye control. Measuring fixation instability identified many children who then went on to have visual reading problems, but who were not identified by any of the conventional phonological measures, such as their early letter knowledge or rhyming ability.

However the Qinetiq specs were still difficult to use with young children and still need to be made much more child friendly. Nevertheless the results were consistent and encourage us to continue to try to develop more convenient ways of measuring eye wobble in young children beginning to learn to read. This should identify any problems early in children’s reading development and thus help us to help the children that experience them to improve their eye control, and thus to avoid the misery that reading problems so often cause.

New study shows how yellow glasses really can help

Although it does not contribute to colour vision the visual magnocellular system is most sensitive to yellow light. Since many dyslexics have weak magnocellular function they often like yellow glasses because these seem to make things look clearer. So Nicky Ray and Sue Fowler have carried out a ‘double blind, placebo controlled, trial’ of reading with yellow filters in dyslexic children who found yellow helped them.

The children’s magnocellular function and reading was assessed before and after randomly selecting them to wear for three-months either the yellow filters or a placebo slotted card, which allowed only one word to be seen at a time; this does help some dyslexics who are distracted by neighbouring words on the page. They found that the children who wore the yellow filters improved their magnocellular function, and their reading increased by 8 months in the 3 months - almost three times as fast as those using the placebo (p<0.05). So it seems yellow filters can indeed greatly help dyslexics’ reading, by boosting their visual magnocellular function.

New study shows that dyslexics are worse at remembering tones than numbers

Dyslexics often have trouble remembering sounds they’ve just heard – for example telephone numbers. So Marina Rose and Burt Rosner have been testing their memory for sequences of tones and comparing this with their ability to remember telephone numbers. They found that they are even worse at remembering the tones, suggesting that their problem with telephone numbers derives from a more basic problem with auditory memory. Anna Pitt and Burt Rosner are now testing whether the same kinds of problem can be seen with visual memory.