Marcos Miguel Meo

Socioeconomic disparities exert a substantial influence on children’s reading development, yet the cognitive mechanisms mediating this relationship remain understudied in Latin American contexts. This study examines how executive functions (EF) and reading fluency mediate the effects of the Level of Educational Opportunities (LEO)—a school-level SES index—on reading comprehension in 348 Argentine primary-school students. Using a digital battery, selective attention, cognitive flexibility, fluid intelligence, and reading comprehension were assessed. Children in low-LEO schools showed poorer EF performance, slower reading speed, and lower comprehension. Path analysis revealed two independent mediation pathways: a fluency-based route (LEO → reading speed → comprehension) and a cognitive route (LEO → EF → fluid intelligence → comprehension). Age mirrored this dual mediation. These findings underscore that school-level socioeconomic environments shape reading outcomes through executive-reasoning skills and fluency, offering actionable targets for intervention to reduce literacy gaps in disadvantaged settings.

We present a novel approach for detecting generalized sleep pathologies through fractal analysis of single-channel EEG signals. We propose that the fractal scaling exponent of permutation entropy time series serves as a robust biomarker of pathological sleep patterns, capturing alterations in brain dynamics across multiple disorders. Using two public datasets (Sleep-EDF and CAP Sleep Database) comprising 200 subjects (112 healthy controls and 88 patients with various sleep pathologies), we computed the fractal scaling of the permutation entropy of these signals. Our results demonstrate significantly reduced scaling exponents in pathological sleep compared to healthy controls (mean = 1.24 vs. 1.06, p<0.001), indicating disrupted long-range temporal correlations in neural activity. The method achieved 90% classification accuracy for REM sleep behavior disorder (F1-score: 0.89) and maintained 74% accuracy when aggregating all pathologies (insomnia, narcolepsy, sleep-disordered breathing, etc.). Key advantages of this approach include compatibility with single-channel EEG (enabling potential wearable applications), independence from sleep-stage annotations, and generalizability across recording montages and sampling rates. This contribution establishes a framework for computationally efficient, non-specific sleep pathology detection that could transform screening protocols and enable earlier intervention.

In this work, we investigate the multifractal properties of eye movement dynamics of children with infantile nystagmus, particularly the fluctuations of its velocity. The eye movements of three children and one adult with infantile nystagmus were evaluated in a simple task in comparison with 28 children with no ocular pathologies. Four indices emerge from the analysis: the classical Hurst exponent, the singularity strength corresponding to the maximum of the singularity spectrum, the asymmetry of the singularity spectrum, and the multifractal strength, each of which characterizes a particular aspect of eye movement dynamics. Our findings indicate that, when compared to children with no ocular pathologies, patients with infantile nystagmus present lower values of all indices. Except for the multifractal strength, the difference in the remaining indices is statistically significant. To test whether the characterization of patients with infantile nystagmus in terms of multifractality indices allows them to be distinguished from children without ocular pathologies, we performed an unsupervised clustering analysis and classified the subjects using supervised clustering techniques. The results indicate that these indices do, indeed, distinctively characterize the eye movements of patients with infantile nystagmus.

The study of eye movements during reading is considered a valuable tool for understanding the underlying cognitive processes and for its ability to detect alterations that could be associated with neurocognitive deficiencies or visual conditions. During reading, the gaze moves from one position to the next on the text performing a saccade–fixation sequence. This dynamics resembles processes usually described as continuous time random walk, where the jumps are the saccadic movements and waiting times are the duration of fixations. The time between jumps (intersaccadic time) consists of stochastic waiting time and flight time, which is a function of the jump length (the amplitude of the saccade). This motivates the present proposal of a model of eye movements during reading in the framework of the intermittent random walk but considering the time between jumps as a combined stochastic-deterministic process. The parameters used in this model were obtained from records of eye movements of children with dyslexia and typically developed for children performing a reading task. The jump lengths arise from the characteristics of the selected text. The time required for the flights was obtained based on a previously proposed model. Synthetic signals were generated and compared with actual eye movement signals in a complexity-entropy plane.