St Edward's Academic Review 2025

ACADEMIC REVIEW 2025

intelligence. Interestingly, there was no connection between general IQ and enhanced creativity, showing that the increased ability to connect concepts was not linked to IQ. However, there was a negative correlation between reading speed and the enhanced connecting domain of the WCR test of creativity, showing that increased lexical challenges are associated with an increased ability to connect concepts. These findings link with the first test study and set up the observation that dyslexia may increase the ability to ‘create’ through connecting ideas, but that advantage is unavoidably associated with the negative impact on reading speed and lexical abilities. This aligns with the biological insights from Schneps above – that learning to read may shut off certain cognitive processes involved in creativity, and that the lack of lexical abilities seen in dyslexia is associated with an advantage in creativity. The next article of interest was produced by El Hmimmdi et al. in 2022. Their study assessed whether anything in the neurobiology of dyslexic individuals might impact how an individual perceives art. It had already been demonstrated that the eye movement of dyslexics was different to non-dyslexics during reading (Ward & Kapoula, 2021), but it was unclear as to whether the same phenomenon occurred when viewing art. In this study, dyslexics and non-dyslexics were shown Op-art works, and conceptual artworks, and their eye movements were recorded using advanced technology. Op-art works such as Riley’s Movements in Squares and Escher’s Relativité cause visual disturbances and influence the viewer to perceive movement and depth, and conceptual art such as that by Magritte and Escher, contains multiple hidden spaces, or requires a reading of the picture to understand its meaning. El Hmimmdi’s study demonstrated that even when viewing art, dyslexic individuals’ eyes move differently. They hypothesised that the microscopic eye movements and fixation instability contribute to a heightened sense of the motion when viewing the Op-art images. The authors also state that the association between these abnormal eye movements when viewing art can be used prospectively as a diagnosis of dyslexia with an accuracy of diagnosis of over 90% (El Hmimmdi, Ward, Palpanas, Sainte Fare Garnot, & Kapoula, 2022). These findings reinforce the concept that dyslexics are more artistically creative because they view the world around them in a different way to non-dyslexics. Building on the above observations, Ward and Kapoula conducted a study which combined the assessments of visual abnormalities and creativity

meta-analyses conducted in the field. Finally, it will assess the most recent thought-based articles, which demonstrate where the field of dyslexia research is currently heading.

Original research

In 2016, Alice Cancer et al. investigated the relationship between dyslexia and creativity, publishing the findings of two studies in the Cogent Psychology journal. The first study applied the WCR test of creativity (similar to the TTCT test), which tests the ability to ‘widen,’ ‘connect’, and ‘reorganise’ concepts. To assess the linkage between creativity and dyslexia, they recruited, fifty-two high school students, nineteen of whom had been diagnosed with dyslexia (plus thirty-three as a control group) and administered the WCR test. In the results of this first experiment, the ‘connecting domain’ showed a statistically significant difference in favour of the dyslexic students, and it was seen in over half of the children, making it a robust observation. This indicates that dyslexic individuals may be more effective in combining ideas to create new, original thoughts or imagery compared to their non-dyslexic counterparts. Their second study in this paper helps to cement the findings above. In this study, a subset of the previous cohort of students were subjected to tests which assessed a relationship between reading ability, IQ scores and WCR scores – exploring the relationship between their enhanced ability to connect ideas or concepts and their ability to read to their level of ‘ Dyslexic individuals may be more effective in combining ideas to create new, original thoughts or imagery compared to their non dyslexic counterparts ’

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