Heikki Lyytinen

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Professor Heikki Lyytinen

General research interests: Human learning, especially neuropsychological and psychophysiological research of learning difficulties/disorders

Specific foci of research: Core precursors of dyslexia, prevention of dyslexia, see Human Development and Its Risk factors (illustrating the work in our CoEs, 1994-2006), and Learning and Motivation (2006 -)

Recent research findings: We have specified ways to identify of dyslexia possible years before school age and developed training tools helping to minimize the challenges of reading acquisition of children at risk, see www.lukimat.fi

Special expertise: Psychophysiology, developmental neuropsychology, Dyslexia

Actual project: LukiMat -project (GraphoGame)

The GraphoGame -project: Recent summary (Brem, S., Bach, S., Kucian,K., Guttorm, T.K., Martin, E., Lyytinen, H., Brandeis, D. & Richardson, U. (2010). Brain sensitivity to print emerges when children learn letter-speech sound correspondences. PNAS, 107(17), 7939-7944).

The acquisition of reading skills is a major landmark process in a human's cognitive development. On the neural level, a new functional network develops during this time, as children typically learn to associate the well-known sounds of their spoken language with unfamiliar characters in alphabetic languages and finally access the meaning of writtenwords, allowing for later reading. A critical component of the mature reading network located in the left occipitotemporal
cortex, termed the visual word-form system (VWFS), exhibits print-sensitive activation in readers.When and howthe sensitivity of the VWFS to print comes about remains an open question. In this study, we demonstrate the initiation of occipito-temporal cortex sensitivity to print using functional MRI (fMRI) (n = 16) and event-related potentials (ERP) (n = 32) in a controlled, longitudinal training study. Print sensitivity of fast (<250 ms) processes in posterior occipito-temporal brain regions accompanied basic associative learning of letter-speech sound correspondences in young (mean age 6.4 ± 0.08 y) nonreading kindergarten children, as shown by concordant ERP and fMRI results. The occipito-temporal print sensitivity thus is established during the earliest phase of reading acquisition in childhood, suggesting that a crucial part of the later reading network first adopts a role in mapping print and sound.