Remotely Controlled Intervention for Developmental Reading and Spelling Disorders

The system for the improvement of reading and writing skills ("Tachidino" software) is based on two principles of proven effectiveness:

1. The selective stimulation of a cerebral hemisphere and specific reading strategies. Taking up some of the principles already set out in the Balance Model of Dyslexia, the aim is to retrace the different stages of reading acquisition by focusing on those stages and processes which have proved more problematic or less efficiently activated. Such stages may require greater involvement of the right hemisphere, carrying out an accurate visual analysis of the material to be read, or of the left hemisphere, anticipating the words to be read by exploiting linguistic skills (knowledge of words, relationships between meanings, relationships between sounds, grammatical agreement and syntactic rules, etc.);
2. the training of selective visuospatial attention, as well as the perception of rapid movement and the analysis of the visual characteristics of words. A further mechanism involved in the training is the so-called visual crowding, an automatic effect of our perceptual system producing a sort of "blurring" of the visual areas surrounding the object to be analyzed, to make its vision clearer. A malfunction of this mechanism and an insufficient ability to concentrate visual attention in a restricted area of the visual field, or to move it quickly and precisely from one point to another would be among the causes of reading disorders, as suggested by the Magnocellular theory of dyslexia.

Studies carried out by researchers at IRCCS Medea have shown excellent results for the two types of treatment (Hemisphere-specific stimulation according to the Balance Model, and Visual-attentional training with Action Video- Games or Wii games, but above all they showed how these effects are strongly enhanced by the association in a single intervention.

Clinical and assessment procedures

In the Tachidino program, the child (sitting in fron of the computer screen) is required to recognize the target candy (a spiral candy) among various candies (distractors) and press the space bar at the exact moment the target candy is crossing a circle target (fixation point). The word to be decoded/encoded is presented, visually or auditory, only if the child clicks at the right moment, thus ensuring that fixation was in correspondence with the fixation point in the center of the visual field. If the bar is pressed in the target timeframe and in correspondence of the target candy, the word to be decoded/encoded is immediately presented and the child is asked to either write the word on the keyboard or re-order a sequence containing all the correct graphemes in random order.