Reading Efficacy Enhancement in Adults with Dyslexia: the Combination of Action Video Games and Parietal tRNS

Neuroplasticity can be increased in adulthood through the transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS). Moreover, literature has demonstrated the effectiveness of action video-games (AVG) training in enhancing attention and reading skills. Thus, we tested whether the combination of tRNS and AVG could be more efficient than AVG only to improve reading skills in adults with dyslexia. In this randomized controlled trial 20 adults with DD followed an AVG training for 15 hours. Half of the participants were stimulated with bilateral posterior parietal tRNS, the other half were in the sham (placebo) condition. Words reading, pseudowords decoding and attentional blink (AB) were measured before and after the training. Results demonstrated that only the AVG+tRNS group showed an enhancement in pseudoword decoding efficiency and in AB. These reading improvement was long lasting after four months. An enhancement in word reading efficiency was recorded in both groups. Moreover, the reduction of AB predicted the pseudowords decoding improvement, whereas the reduction of the distractibility predicted the word reading improvement. By boosting the efficiency of visuo-temporal attention networks, AVG training enhances phonological decoding skills only when bilateral posterior parietal cortex was stimulated.