Clever Experiment: Eye Movements and Dyslexia

Joel Schneider, writing a guest post at the invaluable  Intelligent Insights, reports on a recent German study that challenges the idea that dysfunctions in eye movements are causal to dyslexia.

This, by the way, is another challenge to the assumptions underlying "vision therapy" as an effective treatment for learning disorders.

While reading the pseudowords, the dyslexic boys’ eye movements showed the same unusual patterns as found in previous research. However, while performing the String Processing task, their eye movements were indistinguishable from those of the control group. Although it is possible that there might be some children with reading problems due to eye-movement control problems, these results suggest that such problems are not typical. To quote the title of the article, the relationship between eye movement irregularities and reading problems is “perhaps correlational but not causal.”