Tablet Games for Early Detection and Intervention of Developmental Dyscalculia

The ultimate goal of the project is to provide a screening and rehabilitation method for the early detection and treatment of developmental dyscalculia (DD), in the form of an entertaining, tablet-based gaming environment. DD is a common learning disability and severely impacts personal and professional development throughout the lifespan.

Early diagnosis and interventions increase the possibilities for people with DD to live an independent and productive life.

Children with DD have difficulties to map numbers representation into space (in contrast, typically developing children understanding of numerical concepts is facilitated by spatial mapping of numbers).

We want to develop a tool which will use a gaming environment to evaluate and stimulate Space Number Association (SNA) in children. Kids will be stimulated with game-like SNA tasks and monitored with more general mathematical skills tasks.

We will link the device with an online algorithm for on-line extraction of the responses that can compute and analyse each kids performance to track it as it changes over time. This project builds on two behavioural tasks I have established to implicitly assess SNA in children and infants. These paradigms can become a first-stage screening tool for individuals at high-risk for DD.

We will further advance this method into a tool that allows easy, rapid and automatic testing of space-to-number processing in young children from any cultural and educational background, and in any context.

The paradigms will be embedded in a gaming environment which is optimally engaging for the young users, facilitating the spontaneous participation in foundational numerical training targeted to the needs and specific numerical competences of each child.

Moreover, we will further validate relationship between SNA and core numerical competence development, providing initial crucial steps for empirical validation of our method as an early screening tool for DD.