Mirrors are hard to break: A critical review and behavioral evidence on mirror-image processing in developmental dyslexia

Fernandes, Tânia; Leite, Isabel Cristina de Moura

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2017.02.003

Cited by 30 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 69 publications

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“…As Orton had observed, mirror-image confusions and reversals do seem to linger longer in children diagnosed as dyslexic than in children who learn to read normally (Fernandes and Leite, 2017 ). Lachmann and van Leeuwen ( 2007 ) write that “children with dyslexia fail to suppress symmetry generalization” (p. 73).…”

Section: Dyslexia—a Paradigm Casementioning

confidence: 96%

“…Moreover, they are actually better than normal readers at seeing that mirror images have the same basic shape—thus a b can be seen as the same as a d , rotated about the vertical, or viewed from the other side. The problem with mirror images, moreover, is highly specific; dyslexic children have no problem with shapes rotated in the picture plane, in which d and p are the same (Fernandes and Leite, 2017 ).…”

Section: Dyslexia—a Paradigm Casementioning

confidence: 99%

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Mirror-Image Equivalence and Interhemispheric Mirror-Image Reversal

Corballis

2018

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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Mirror-image confusions are common, especially in children and in some cases of neurological impairment. They can be a special impediment in activities such as reading and writing directional scripts, where mirror-image patterns (such as b and d) must be distinguished. Treating mirror images as equivalent, though, can also be adaptive in the natural world, which carries no systematic left-right bias and where the same object or event can appear in opposite viewpoints. Mirror-image equivalence and confusion are natural consequences of a bilaterally symmetrical brain. In the course of learning, mirror-image equivalence may be established through a process of symmetrization, achieved through homotopic interhemispheric exchange in the formation of memory circuits. Such circuits would not distinguish between mirror images. Learning to discriminate mirror-image discriminations may depend either on existing brain asymmetries, or on extensive learning overriding the symmetrization process. The balance between mirror-image equivalence and mirror-image discrimination may nevertheless be precarious, with spontaneous confusions or reversals, such as mirror writing, sometimes appearing naturally or as a manifestation of conditions like dyslexia.

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Section: Dyslexia—a Paradigm Casementioning

confidence: 96%

Section: Dyslexia—a Paradigm Casementioning

confidence: 99%

Mirror-Image Equivalence and Interhemispheric Mirror-Image Reversal

Corballis

2018

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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“…Given the educational importance of both reading and the reading disorder dyslexia [67,68], it is worth stressing that the present theory cannot be directly applied to reading. One of the reasons for this is that, in reading, children see the correct writing of the characters, so they do not have directly to make decisions about their orientation.…”

Section: Can the Theory Be Extended To Character Recognition?mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Synoptic and Theoretical Account of Character (Digits and Capital Letters) Reversal in Writings by Typically Developing Children

Fischer

Luxembourger

2018

Education Sciences

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Reversing characters (digits and letters) when writing, and complete mirror writing, raise one of the oldest and most mysterious questions in developmental and educational psychology: Why do five-year-old children write symbols (e.g., ∃ for E) they have neither learnt nor seen? Attempts to draw up a complete explanatory theory of character reversal in writings by typically developing children were long hindered by the existence of a seemingly satisfactory explanation (left-hand writing), the failure to bring together research in neuropsychology and educational psychology, and the failure to consider the shape and structure of the characters. The present paper remedies this situation by describing a new, comprehensive theory based on recent neuropsychological findings and extensive empirical observations. The theory assumes that a character's orientation, detected in the early visual processing area, is deleted (or made inaccessible) by the mirror generalization process during transfer to memory. Consequently, there is a period, usually around age five, during which children have representations of the characters' shapes but not their orientations. Hence, when asked to write a character, children have to improvise its orientation, and the orientation they choose (implicitly, non-consciously) is often derived from the writing direction in their culture. Introduction: Historical BackgroundCharacter reversal, which results in left-right reversed characters (letters and digits) that appear normal when read in a mirror, is a major component of mirror writing. In the scientific literature, it was first described in 1878 by Buchwald, who reported several cases of character reversal in writing by patients with brain lesions and by healthy individuals, most notably children, nearly all of whom wrote with their left hand [1]. This pioneering study launched a new field of research and triggered numerous reports of mirror writing by both pathological and non-pathological individuals. Less felicitously, Buchwald's implicit suggestion that mirror writing was restricted to people who wrote with their left hand, whether naturally or deliberately, would cloud research for over a century.Erlenmeyer immediately included Buchwald's paper in his book on "Writing", quoting at length the paragraph describing children who mirror wrote with their left hand, but, when alerted to the incorrectness of their writing, wrote correctly with their right hand [2]. Furthermore, by suggesting "abductive left-hand writing" (linkshändige Abductionsschrift in German) as a more appropriate name for "mirror writing", Erlenmeyer reduced mirror writing to a mechanistic result of writing with the left hand: Characters and words are reversed when an individual writes abductively (outwards from the body midline) with the left hand.

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“…Therefore the present findings challenge the accepted way of thinking that character reversal (digits and letters) by typical developing children is the same phenomenon in reading and writing. None of the numerous studies on reversal in reading [7,51,[57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64] underlines such a difference between the two tasks, which are associated in teaching/learning and in the brain [65]. Nevertheless, a simple description of the behavior of children who have unoriented representations of digits can account for the difference between writing and reading: when writing, children make the digits face right and therefore reverse the left-oriented digits 1, 2, 3, 7, and 9; when choosing between a correct and a mirror writing in a recognition task, (if possible) they choose the writing on the right.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Battle between the Correct and Mirror Writings of a Digit in Children’s Recognition Memory

Fischer

Luxembourger

2020

Education Sciences

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Recent research into character reversals in writings produced by occidental children has shown that they mainly reverse the left-oriented digits (1, 2, 3, 7, and 9) and therefore appear to apply a right-orienting rule. But do they produce similar reversal errors when asked to recognize the digits? In an experiment, based on eye-tracking observations of 50 children (Mage = 5.4 years), children had to point towards a target digit in a 2 × 2 matrix also containing three distractor digits, one of which was the mirror-reversed writing of the correctly written target digit. This recognition task led to a true “battle” in children’s memory between the two writings of the target digit. This battle is shown in the graphical abstract that represents a heat map from a sub-sample of children (on the left side) and the fixation points map from an individual child (on the right side). Rather than following the predicted right-orienting rule, the children’s responses appeared to be biased towards digits in the right-hand column of the 2 × 2 matrices (when the reversed target digit was not in the same column as the correctly written target digit). As a whole, these findings support the hypotheses that many 4- to 6-year-old’s representations of the digit writings are unoriented in their memory and that these children may adopt different solutions to overcome this lack of orientation depending on whether they write or read.

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Mirrors are hard to break: A critical review and behavioral evidence on mirror-image processing in developmental dyslexia

Cited by 30 publications

References 69 publications

Mirror-Image Equivalence and Interhemispheric Mirror-Image Reversal

Mirror-Image Equivalence and Interhemispheric Mirror-Image Reversal

A Synoptic and Theoretical Account of Character (Digits and Capital Letters) Reversal in Writings by Typically Developing Children

The Battle between the Correct and Mirror Writings of a Digit in Children’s Recognition Memory

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