Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience
Author: Marcos Miguel Meo | email: marcos.meo@uns.edu.ar
Marcos Meo 1°, Francisco Iaconis 1°, Jessica Del Punta 1°, Gustavo Gasaneo 2°
1° Universidad Nacional del Sur – IFISUR, 8000 Bahía Blanca, Argentina
2° Centro Integral de Neurociencias Aplicadas, 8000 Bahía Blanca, Argentina
Studies show that around 10% of the children population suffers some of the various learning disorders related to reading abilities. Dyslexia, a disorder mainly characterized by a difficulty in reading decoding, is one of the most studied. The relationship between eye movements and cognitive processes has been widely studied in recent years. In this context, detailed knowledge of the eye movements of children with dyslexia during reading can help improve early diagnosis and suggest efficient clinical treatment by providing otherwise inaccessible details of the reading process. In the present work, the eye movements of 12 children diagnosed with dyslexia and 30 typically developed children were studied. Fixations and saccades were characterized and compared. This allowed us to propose a model, based on the continuous time random walk, to describe the eye movements dynamics of dyslexic and typical readers. The model provides a quantitative description of each group and allows to identify global macroscopic features, such as reading speed, the memory present on the reading process through the Hurst exponent and the variability on the jump lengths through the statistical complexity and Jensen-Shannon entropy.