Atypical oscillatory and aperiodic signatures of visual sampling in developmental dyslexia

Abstract

Temporal processing deficits in Developmental Dyslexia (DD) have been documented extensively at the behavioral level, leading to the formulation of neural theories positing that such anomalies in parsing multisensory input rely on aberrant synchronization of neural oscillations or to an excessive level of neural noise. Despite reading being primarily supported by visual functions, experimental evidence supporting these theories remains scarce. Here, we tested 26 adults with DD (9 females) and 31 neurotypical controls (16 females) with a temporal segregation/integration task that required participants to either integrate or segregate two rapidly presented displays while their EEG activity was recorded. We confirmed a temporal sampling deficit in DD, which specifically affected the rapid segregation of visual input. While the ongoing alpha frequency and the excitation/inhibition (E/I) ratio (i.e., an index of neural noise quantified by the aperiodic exponent) were differently modulated based on task demands in typical readers, DD participants exhibited an impairment in alpha speed modulation and an altered E/I ratio that affected their rapid visual sampling. Nonetheless, an association between visual temporal sampling accuracy and both alpha frequency and the E/I ratio measured at rest were evident in the DD group, further confirming an anomalous interplay between alpha synchronization, the E/I ratio and active visual sampling. These results provide evidence that both trait- and state-like differences in alpha-band synchronization and neural noise levels coexist in the dyslexic brain and are synergistically responsible for cascade effects on visual sampling and reading.