Speaker
Description
Reading plays an important role in functional maintenance, preserving significantly cognitive functions in ageing individuals and allowing people to keep up to date, ensure continuous training for a complex task, and experience emotions.
To investigate the relationship between normal ageing and reading skills, we tested a novel experimental protocol that combines measures of visual crowding (MEC: Facchin et al. 2019; and BReViS: Facchin et al 2023), measures of sustained and selective attention, working memory, and processing speed provided by the Symbol Digit Modalities Test (SDMT: Nocentini et al. 2006), with the online assessment of reading fluency by means of “finger-tracking data” (ReadLet: Ferro et al. 2018, Crepaldi et al. 2020). ReadLet evidence consists in the recorded (oral) reading of a connected text displayed on a tablet touchscreen, time-aligned with the recording of the movements of the reader’s index finger concurrently underlining the same text (known as “finger-point reading”). We applied the protocol to a cohort of neurologically healthy older adults aged 65-75 (38 women, mean age: 68.6, 23 men, mean age: 69.3), with an above-average schooling background (mostly high school graduates), hosted in long-term care facilities in the province of Milan (Pegoraro et al. 2023).
We propose a detailed analysis of the observed correlations between reading performance on ReadLet and cognitive performance on MEC, BReVIS and SDMT. Convergent and complementary evidence suggests that many factors can contribute to reading decline, with specific aspects of cognitive decline differentially affecting the processes involved in a complex, multi-sensory cognitive task such as reading.
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