Visual processing activation in the magnocellular pathway is associated with Developmental Dyslexia

According to the magnocellular (M) deficit theory, deficits in the visual M functions predict reading skills and are associated with Developmental Dyslexia (DD). We acquired two well-established visual tasks (i.e. a sinusoidal grating and a coherent dots motion detection) in 22 Normal Readers (NR) and 22 children with DD. We applied a multi-variate pattern analysis approach to combine the two tasks. The combination of their activation patterns significantly discriminated between NR and children with DD, suggesting that differences in the M functions are present between the two populations and supporting the M deficit theory.