Search Abstracts | Symposia | Slide Sessions | Poster Sessions
Altered Individual Variability in Chinese Children with Reading Difficulties
Poster Session A - Sandbox Series, Thursday, October 24, 10:00 - 11:30 am, Great Hall 3 and 4
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Yue Yang1, Jie Chen2, Chan Tang2, Guosheng Ding#; 1BeiJing Normal University
Approximately 5-10% of schoolchildren in China suffer reading difficulties characterized by impaired reading performance despite normal IQ. Some researchers posit that the fundamental deficit in reading difficulties lies in the capacity for orthography-phonology mapping. Previous neuroimaging investigations of reading difficulties have primarily focused on identifying group-average differences in brain connectomes between poor readers (PR) and typical readers (TR) when performing reading tasks. However, compared to resting fMRI, task fMRI creates the same processing across all subjects while ignoring some of the characteristics inherent in the subject underlying activation and connection. Here we examined the whole-brain functional connectomes in both PR group and TR during a resting state. Specifically, we collected functional MRI data from 46 children aged from 8.22to 12.47 years old, including 18 PRs and 28 TRs. All participants underwent the Chinese Character Recognition test, commonly utilized to assess word recognition proficiency. Our findings revealed that the functional connectivity during resting state was similar between the two groups and did not exhibit significant differences. Nevertheless, we still assume that individual variability can more sensitively capture differences in the neural mechanisms of poor readers and typical readers. So we further shifted our focus to individual variances, and examined the brain patterns and behavioral performance at the individual level. We examined interindividual variability in functional connectomes (IVFC) within the TR and PR groups. Regions demonstrating the top 5% highest IVFC differences between the two groups were identified as critical areas. The overall IVFC pattern in PRs generally resembled that in TRs, with the PR group exhibiting higher IVFC in a widespread area encompassing the bilateral cuneus, middle temporal gyrus (MTG), insula, as well as the right medial orbitofrontal gyrus (mOFG) and thethe right inferior parietal lobule (IPL). While, as to the TR group, exhibited higher IVFC in unimodal areas. At the participant level, we correlated the IVFC of these regions with Chinese Character Recognition test performance and found that individuals with higher IVFC tended to demonstrate lower behavioral performance, particularly in the default mode network (DMN) and ventral attention network (VAN). Notably, in PRs, this trend was more pronounced (r<-0.48, FDR p<0.05) than in TRs (FDR uncorrected). In summary, our research provides a novel perspective on the disparities between poor readers and typical readers, suggesting that poor readers may experience disruptions in heteromodal cortices, offering a potential guide to the intervention of these poor readers during education.
Topic Areas: Disorders: Developmental, Reading