Facial Expression Recognition in Children with Dyscalculia

Developmental dyscalculia (DD) is a subtype of learning disability characterized by lowered mathematical skills. Its prevalence ranges between 3% and 8% (Rubinsten & Henik, 2009; Rapin, 2016). Mathematical performance depends on the specific numerical skills required in each area of mathematics and the development of complex cognitive functions, among which researchers most often note visuospatial working memory and symbolic number processing abilities. However, there are many studies supporting the idea of a domain-specific deficit in dyscalculics due to the difficulties in understanding the basic numerical concepts, such as magnitude comparison or accounting. Consequently, the following research question arises: are the difficulties of facial recognition and facial expression characteristic of dyscalculia, and if yes, can this disorder indicate the presence of a common cause of cognitive impairment in dyscalculia and some other learning disabilities in the form of impairment in visual perception? The problem of studying the perception of facial expression in dyscalculia includes two aspects. The first aspect is connected with the fact that there are a lot of publications regarding concomitant pathology of dyscalculia in the form of comorbidity with dyslexia. However, there are often papers describing disturbances in the perception of facial expression and dyslexia, but there are practically no works on similar disorders in dyscalculia. The second aspect concerns the description of the same brain regions related to dyscalculia and the perception of facial expression; however, dyscalculia and facial expression are described separately. Emotion processing is different from «pure» face perception paradigms in many aspects, however, many modern works show that there is much more in common in the processing of «pure» faces and facial expressions than it seemed before (Guyer et al., 2008; Thome et al., 2022, Zinchenko et al., 2018). The face and facial expression recognition could be considered as another, probably impaired function in dyscalculic individuals. The possibility of expanding the scope of dyscalculia research through the use of paradigms of face perception can be considered promising. Presumably, this would help to understand dyscalculia better and use these data to establish new rehabilitation trajectories. Our research shows the benefits of using neurophysiological methods for assessment the facial emotion recognition in dyscalculia. There were no differences in the ability of dyscalculic children to distinguish photos with a neutral faces in the behavioral experiments, but they were shown in EEG indicators. The total number of mistakes made in recognizing facial expressions in children with dyscalculia significantly worse in comparison with control group. The study confirmed the assumptions that we put forward earlier, believing that facial expression recognition may suffer in children with dyscalculia as a domain-nonspecific function (Baulina & Kosonogov, 2024). Typical mistakes include difficulties in differentiating fear and surprise, sadness and disgust. The study of the peculiarities of perception of facial expression in children with dyscalculia is a promising direction. The results obtained can be used for in-depth neuropsychological diagnostics of the mechanisms of visual-spatial impairment in children with dyscalculia and the development of effective rehabilitation methods.