Imagery by Ear or Eye

Here's a study that highlights the trouble with thinking about simple classifications of visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learners. Whether we read or listen to words that have strong images, the intraparietal sulcus or IPS seems to be an important brain area to be activated.

Images, like the IPS, are very multimodal, incorporating visual pictures, sound, sense of space, and movement. The graphs below show that whether strong image-evoking words were read or heard, the left IPS became quite active.

The intraparietal sulci (right and left) are very cross-modal and interestingly implicated in some of the dyslexia-plus traits such as dyspraxia / motor planning difficulties, dyscalculia / impaired number sense, and verbal short term memory.

Because in crossmodal areas, different senses and motor plans work together, it may be easy to imagine that its not hard to disrupt sophisticated functioning in the IPS. On the other hand, it also might suggest that remediation or integrative training that improves the functioning of the IPS could have many positive effects on learning, sensory processing, motor planning, and imagination or imagery.

BTW, it looks as if we will be traveling down to LA at the end of the month to see some docs for our daughter at UCLA, we'll take a brief blog break at the end of the month, but God willing will be back in November. Thank you for your prayers and best wishes. Also another nice surprise because we're driving is that we'll be able to speak at The Nueva School's Gifted Learning Conference on October 26th after all! Please say hello if you see us -



Imagery fMRI - Listening vs. Seeing
Praxis and IPS
IPS and Verbal Working Memory
IPS and Dyscalculia / Math Disability
IPS and Crossmodal Space and Attention

Video Game Training Narrows Spatial Gender Gap

A short course of video game training (10 hrs) narrowed the spatial gender gap in spatial attention and mental rotation.

Because mental rotation and visual spatial awareness are skills required for disciplines within engineering, architecture, or science, and discrepancies exist between male and female groups on the whole (men generally outperform women on spatial tasks), studies like this are helpful for the potential help they may provide for women (and spatially-weak men) who find their spatial skills are limiting their achievement in certain fields.



Not surprisingly, action video games were more effective than non-action, probably because of their increased dynamic demands and visual-motor planning. Interestingly, science majors were much stronger than art majors in spatial attention. I bet art majors might differ depending on their media or style preferences (whole vs. part, 2D vs. 3D); also it would be interesting to think about different skill sets within particular scientific domains (e.g. biology vs. chemistry or physics).

Video Game Training Reduces Gender Gap in Spatial Cognition
Gender Differences in Spatial Task Performance
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Spatial Cognition
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Direct Contact Learning - Spatial Reasoning & Engineers

Directing Attention - The Bane of Multi-Tasking

Along the lines of walking and chewing gum at the same time, this study from the Just lab shows that does indeed take more prefrontal work (directed attention) to listen and watch at the same time. In fact, if you're trying to listen and watch at the same time, you're more likely to lose what you're listening to.

This makes sense with what we see below, and is not surprising that youngsters in general (including young gifted children) struggle with not paying attention to what you said...it may be too much coming in visually to listen.



The main problem we see in our clinic is that unitasking kids are misdiagnosed as having ADD or ADHD ("hyperfocus", e.g. not hearing Mom call when playing a video game or watching TV), or autism. Children who struggle with multi-tasking may indeed have real classroom challenges for certain activities, but weak multi-tasking by itself is not an indicator or disease, and for many, the greatest problems will be had while their brains are still developing.

A final closing thought - It's nice to see studies such as this teasing out the biological process behind challenges with multi-tasking, but wouldn't it be great if as much effort were put into the development of programs that could help kids (and some adults) build up their weak abilities?

Listening and Watching, Multi-tasking fMRI pdf