Laboratory measures of behavior and brain activity point to quicker loss of perceptual memory in people with dyslexia. Neural responses in auditory and visual cortex that normally dampen with repetition return to baseline more rapidly, and perceptual distinctions remain less complex. Those altered dynamics can slow vocabulary growth and make it harder to refine the fine-grained categories that fluent reading depends on, especially as children are exposed to more varied input over time.
Understanding dyslexia through the lens of learning dynamics has practical implications for instruction and design. If perceptual traces decay faster, interventions might aim to strengthen retention windows or to structure experience so patterns are reinforced at the right pace. The linked article explores these ideas with behavioral, neural, and computational evidence and raises questions about how adjusting exposure and feedback could expand reading potential for more learners.
The basic mechanisms that underlie developmental dyslexia – a difficulty in acquiring reading expertise – are still debated. We propose that such difficulties should be understood within the broad framework of learning and skill acquisition. Behavioral and neural studies, as well as computational analyses, imply that acquiring expertise has atypical dynamics in dyslexia, largely due to reduced perceptual memory, which is manifested in faster decay of perceptual traces of both speech and non-speech stimuli. This faster behavioral decay is associated with faster decay of neural adaptation to stimulus regularities in perceptual cortices. We propose that these atypical dynamics lead to a slower accumulation of language statistics, manifested in reduced complexity of perceptual categories, slower acquisition of words, and – counterintuitively – larger relative difficulties as exposure to stimuli grows.