The current Brazilian educational scenario, evaluated by different national and international indicators, has shown alarming results in mathematics, science and especially in reading. The country is in the last positions in all evaluations. For the change of this scenario, urgent educational measures that respect the student's biological and social development are necessary. The applied neurosciences to education emerge as a theoretical model of aid for pedagogical practices that aim to improve quality in education. An important contribution of neurosciences in education is focused on reading, through a theoretical/practical contribution on brain functioning those points more effective paths for literacy with a view to reading competence. In this sense, it was possible to understand that the human species has not yet developed a specific neural system for reading, using other brain structures for this function, ie literacy depends on a neural recycling process of brain structures associated with Sensory, motor and language functions, as is the case with brain regions associated with faces recognition, to accommodate the decoding of the written word. The aim of this study is to investigate reading in school -age children. To this end, the present thesis divided into two studies: Study 1 that investigates the inhibition of the generalization of letters in mirror in school -age children and the study 2 that investigates the relationship between reading competence and perceptual organization strategies of the visual scene in schools . Both studies were conducted in three public schools in the Belém do Pará Metropolitan Region, Brazil. Altogether two hundred and thirty -one subjects aged 6 to 10 years (113 boys, 8.2 ± 1.4 years and 118 girls, 8.2 ± 1.4 years), enrolled 1 to 5th years, were recruited, 1,2 ± 1.4 years old) elementary School. Among these eighty -eight subjects were students from school 1, fifty -two from school 2 and ninety from the school 3. In all, six tests were applied, each school participated in a different group of tests. Our results show that the performance of boys in the 6-10 year old is different from that of girls in the same age group for the reading competence test, with boys with higher performance, although it is not possible to establish differences between genders to the perceptual closure test. What's more, while boys performed significantly better in the rotation of letters in the older group, girls' performance was similar in both groups. This pattern is reverse for the mirror's task, with the older girls surpassing their younger counterparts and the boys performing similarly in both groups. Since the age period of our sample is not associated with large variations in reproductive steroid levels, we propose that the similarity of performance between younger and older girls in the mental rotation of letters may be associated with society's traditional attitudes and expectations and expectations about the relationship between spatial visual skills and gender. As for the mirror's task, while only girls showed a significant difference between the two age groups, the boys showed improvement, as expected by the mirror generalization inhibition to letters during reading. These findings are relevant to the development of more effective future strategies for optimizing the literacy process of school -age children, combining education and neuroscience. For this, more studies must be performed and the number of subjects investigated should be expanded.
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