The emergence of new strategies for Evidence-Based Education: the effects of a multisensory training and post-training sleep in breaking mirror invariance

Abstract

A defining characteristic of humanity as a species is its ability to invent and culturally transmit technologies responsible for transforming life on Earth. Writing and reading are among the most significant inventions that allowed humans to “communicate their thoughts” through visual support. Children face visual difficulty in mirror writing by creating confusion between mirror letters (e.g., b=d). Mirror confusion for letters emerges as a natural consequence of a deeply rooted visual mechanism in our visual system: mirror invariance. Mirror invariance is a visual mechanism that enables a prompt recognition of mirror images. This visual capacity emerges early in human development and helps recognize objects, faces, and places from both left and right perspectives; and is also present in primates, pigeons, and cephalopods. Thus, mirror discrimination for letters should be learned for fast letter recognition and, thus, for fluent reading. However, traditionally, schools do not provide such specific learning, and the correct orientation of letters is learned sparsely, with time and continuous practice. Based on that, we applied a specific targeted training, since practice is necessary for learning, to address mirror confusion for letters in 1st graders learning to read. We based our training on our hypothetical mechanism: “multisystem mappings”, i.e., mappings of letter representation across sensory-motor systems. To keep the training short (7.5 hours in total, across 3 weeks), we associated a physiological learning enhancer: post-training sleep consolidation. We observed massif effects of mirror discrimination learning for letters which led to double the reading speed by a crucial role played by sleep consolidation in the magnitude, automaticity, and long-term duration of this specific learning.