Auditory time perception impairment in children with developmental dyscalculia

Abstract

Developmental dyscalculia (DD) is a specific learning disability which prevents children from acquiring adequate numerical and arithmetical competences. We investigated whether difficulties in children with DD spread beyond the numerical domain and impact also their ability to perceive time. A group of 37 children/adolescent with and without DD were tested with an auditory categorization task measuring time perception thresholds in the sub-second (0.25-1 s) and supra-second (0.75-3 s) ranges. Results showed that auditory time perception was strongly impaired in children with DD at both time scales. The impairment remained even when age, non-verbal reasoning, and gender were regressed out. Overall, our results show that the difficulties of DD can affect magnitudes other than numerical and contribute to the increasing evidence that frames dyscalculia as a disorder affecting multiple neurocognitive and perceptual systems.

Keywords: ATOM; Auditory time perception; Developmental dyscalculia; Magnitude processing.