Rapid and widespread white matter plasticity during an intensive reading intervention

Summary & key facts

Researchers followed grade-school children who struggled with reading through an 8-week, intensive reading program. They took repeated brain scans that measure the brain's white matter — the bundles of wiring that connect different brain areas — and tested reading skills during the program. They found that many white-matter pathways changed across the 8 weeks at the same time the children’s reading improved, while some pathways predicted who would read better but did not change. This suggests that some brain features reflect past ability and some change quickly with recent learning.

Key facts:

• The study tracked grade-school children who had trouble reading while they took part in an 8-week intensive reading program.
• Researchers used repeated diffusion MRI scans, a type of brain scan that looks at white matter, the brain’s wiring, to measure changes over time.
• Many white-matter pathways showed large-scale changes during the 8-week program at the same time the children’s reading skills improved.
• Some white-matter pathways consistently predicted how well a child could read but did not change during the program, meaning they were stable markers of reading ability.
• Other white-matter pathways changed with the intervention, suggesting parts of the brain’s wiring can adapt quickly during focused learning.
• The findings mean that when scientists compare brain scans to behavior, they should think about what the person has recently been learning, because recent experience can alter brain anatomy.

Abstract

White matter tissue properties are known to correlate with performance across domains ranging from reading to math, to executive function. Here, we use a longitudinal intervention design to examine experience-dependent growth in reading skills and white matter in grade school-aged, struggling readers. Diffusion MRI data were collected at regular intervals during an 8-week, intensive reading intervention. These measurements reveal large-scale changes throughout a collection of white matter tracts, in concert with growth in reading skill. Additionally, we identify tracts whose properties predict reading skill but remain fixed throughout the intervention, suggesting that some anatomical properties stably predict the ease with which a child learns to read, while others dynamically reflect the effects of experience. These results underscore the importance of considering recent experience when interpreting cross-sectional anatomy-behavior correlations. Widespread changes throughout the white matter may be a hallmark of rapid plasticity associated with an intensive learning experience.

Topics

Advanced MRI Techniques and Applications Advanced Neuroimaging Techniques and Applications Functional Brain Connectivity Studies

Categories

Health Sciences Medicine Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

Tags

Developmental psychology Diffusion MRI Intervention (counseling) Law Magnetic resonance imaging Medicine Neuroplasticity Neuroscience Political science Psychiatry Psychology Radiology Reading (process) White matter