Coherence motion perception in developmental dyslexia: a meta-analysis of behavioral studies

The magnitude of the association between developmental dyslexia (DD) and motion sensitivity is evaluated in 35 studies, which investigated coherence motion perception in DD. A first analysis is conducted on the differences between DD groups and age-matched control (C) groups. In a second analysis, the relationship between motion coherence threshold and reading ability is considered. Globally, the mean effect size (ES) is moderate (d = 0.675, 2334 subjects) with a large value (d = 0.747) for the between-groups differences in motion perception and a smaller mean ES (d = 0.178) for the correlational studies. The influence on ES of the stimuli parameters and subjects age is analyzed. The number of dots, the age of the subjects, and the type of analysis (i.e. between-group or correlational) are significantly related to the ES. Looking at the ES values, a smaller number of dots constituting the stimuli are associated with larger ES and, interestingly, the children studies are associated with lower ES in comparison with the researches evaluating adults. The large ES value supports the importance of studying motion perception deficits in DD groups, consistently with the claim that dorsal impairment/noise-exclusion deficit could be one of the risk factor of reading difficulties.