Relationship of IQ and Reading Score to Visual, Spatial, and Temporal Matching Tasks

Abstract

Intersensory integration has been extensively explored in relation to reading and its developmental anomalies. Since matching across sensory modalities also involves different modes of presentation (auditory-sequential vs. visual-spatial), we tested the ability of normal and learning disabled children to match spatially arranged patterns of dots as well as sequences of light flashes within a single modality, vision. Normal and experimental subjects found it easiest to match spatial patterns with each other, and that task did not distinguish between the two groups. The other tasks were more difficult for both, particularly when sequential flashes of light were presented first and had to be matched to other flashes of light or to a spatial pattern. On these tasks the performance of normal children was significantly better than that of the learning disabled. Only the condition which required matching from sequence to pattern correlated with reading age among the learning disabled: possibly it is a process similar to word blending. Only those matching tasks which involved sequencing (the temporal display of flashes) correlated with WISC Performance and Full Scale IQ, while none of them correlated with WISC Verbal IQ. The oldest normal subjects performed better on all the tasks than younger ones, particularly surpassing younger children on matching a temporal standard and a spatial comparison. The oldest learning disabled children did not perform significantly better than the youngest.