A green filter increases reading speed in dyslexic children
A green filter increases reading speed in dyslexic children
Reading, one of the greatest difficulties for children with dyslexia, can be improved by the use of green lenses.
A study published by Brazilian and French researchers showed that volunteers of 9 and 10 years who used green filters experienced an increase in reading speed. In children without dyslexia, these filters did not have any effect.
Those green filters were patented in 1983 and have already been prescribed not only for children with dyslexia but also for carriers of autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
"However, the studies conducted on its effectiveness suffered from methodological deficiencies. For the first time a very rigorous methodology has been used, "said Milena Razuk, first author of the article, published in Research in Developmental Disabilities.
The lack of studies on filters means that they are not widely used in Brazil, but some other countries, such as France, do adopt them.
Razuk, who completed his PhD at the Cruzeiro do Sul University (in São Paulo, Brazil) in April, carried out the experiment during his time at the Université Paris Diderot, Paris 7, as part of a research internship and with the support from the Support Foundation for Scientific Research of the State of São Paulo - FAPESP.
(Photo: Milena Razuk)
We selected 18 children with dyslexia and another 18 who did not suffer from this condition, all attended at the Robert Debret Hospital in Paris. For the experiment, the scientists chose the yellow and green color filters.
"There are 12 colors available, but we arrived at those two because it would be a very big difficulty for volunteers to stay for so long," said José Angelo Barela, a professor at the Unesp Biosciences Institute, based in location of Rio Claro, in Brazil, and project coordinator.
The 36 children were put to read on a screen fragments of children's books recommended for their age group. They read different extracts without a filter, with a yellow filter and a green filter.
During all the time they used a device supported on the head that measures the movements of the eyes called Eye Tracker. These are glasses with two cameras that send infrared signals to the eyes, detect where the user is fixing their eyes and determine the time used to fix it.
"Children with dyslexia need to fix their gaze on words for a longer time to understand the text, which is why reading speed is lower," said Barela.
While in children without dyslexia there were no changes in the speed of reading with the filters, the Eye Tracker detected that children with dyslexia happened to fix fragments of words or phrases by 500 milliseconds using the green filter. Without the filter or using the yellow filter, the time was 600 milliseconds.
In any case, this period of time is longer than that of children without dyslexia, whose fixation is 400 thousandths of a second. The authors of the study emphasize that they did not evaluate whether the green filter improved the understanding of what was read.
The causes of dyslexia are not known, which causes its carriers to have a less precise sensory-motor integration. "It's like there's some noise that blocks the brain's communication with the rest of the body," Razuk said.
However, this condition does not mean an intellectual disability. "To make the diagnosis of dyslexia, the IQ must be normal or above average," said the researcher who had the support of FAPESP.
In the study, the authors note that the improvement of the reading time with the green filter may be due to changes in the visual stimulus available for processing in the central nervous system.
Other studies suggested that the filters reduce the excitability of the cerebral cortex, which may be greater in dyslexics and therefore hinder reading. According to this hypothesis, the filter would diminish the visual stimulus and, consequently, it would improve the reading.
This possibility gained strength after studies with functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) published in 2015 showed a significant activation of the cortex of volunteers during reading with color filters (blue, in this case), compared with the others that did not use any filter. These lenses, therefore, would decrease visual stress and distortion of the text, improving visual processing and reading performance.
The next step of the research will be to verify the brain activity of dyslexic children during reading with an fMRI device that Barela acquired with the support of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) of Brazil. (Source: Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo)
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