Miglioramenti indotti da Action VideoGames predicono future abilità di lettura

Developmental dyslexia is a neurodevelopmental disability characterized by reading difficulties despite adequate cognitive abilities and neurological profile. Research in the past 10 years has found that action videogames (AVGs) can be effective in improving reading (dis)abilities in both clinical samples and general population, acting on visuo-spatial attention and phonological skills. Our objective was to further investigate how AVG treatments during the last year of kindergarten can influence the development of reading skills during the first years of primary school. We assessed neuropsychological and cognitive skills on a sample of 58 preschool children before and after a 14-hour treatment based on AVGs and assessed again their skills as well as reading related abilities after a year at the end of the first grade. We ran step-wise linear regressions with mean reading at the end of the first grade as the dependent variable and proficiency in neuropsychological precursors before the treatment as well as the change in neuropsychological precursors of reading during the treatment as the independent variables. The results showed a significant effect in the change before and after the AVG treatment in the cross-modal mapping and the attention span on reading abilities assessed after a year, even after controlling for the baseline performance. The results show that AVG-related changes in cross-modal mapping and attention significantly predict better reading skills after a year. Taken together these results showed that a very brief AVG treatment not only induces an improvement in visual processing and verbal memory retrieval as well as visuo-spatial attention, but it also predicts better reading skills after a year. AVGs could be therefore considered an accessible, cost-effective and effective tool to be easily implemented in schools during a critical developmental period during which neurocognitive fundamentals for reading development start to be consolidated. Key words: developmental dyslexia, action videogames, visuo-spatial attention, cross-modal mapping