TY - JOUR
T1 - Visual and auditory attentional capture are both sluggish in children with developmental dyslexia
AU - Facoetti, Andrea
AU - Lorusso, Maria Luisa
AU - Cattaneo, Carmen
AU - Galli, Raffaella
AU - Molteni, Massimo
PY - 2005
Y1 - 2005
N2 - Automatic multimodal spatial attention was studied in 12 dyslexic children (SRD), 18 chronological age matched (CA) and 9 reading level matched (RL) normally reading children by measuring reaction times (RTs) to lateralized visual and auditory stimuli in cued detection tasks. The results show a slower time course of focused multimodal attention (FMA) in SRD children than in both CA and RL controls. Specifically, no cueing effect (i.e., RTs difference between cued-uncued) was found in SRD children at 100 ms cue-target delay, while it was present at 250 ms cue-target delay. In contrast, in both CA and RL controls, a cueing effect was found at the shorter cue-target delay but it disappeared at the longer cue-target delay, as predicted by theories of automatic capture of attention. Our results suggest that FMA may be crucial for learning to read, and we propose a possible causal explanation of how a FMA deficit leads to specific reading disability, suggesting that sluggish FMA in dyslexic children could be caused by a specific parietal dysfunction.
AB - Automatic multimodal spatial attention was studied in 12 dyslexic children (SRD), 18 chronological age matched (CA) and 9 reading level matched (RL) normally reading children by measuring reaction times (RTs) to lateralized visual and auditory stimuli in cued detection tasks. The results show a slower time course of focused multimodal attention (FMA) in SRD children than in both CA and RL controls. Specifically, no cueing effect (i.e., RTs difference between cued-uncued) was found in SRD children at 100 ms cue-target delay, while it was present at 250 ms cue-target delay. In contrast, in both CA and RL controls, a cueing effect was found at the shorter cue-target delay but it disappeared at the longer cue-target delay, as predicted by theories of automatic capture of attention. Our results suggest that FMA may be crucial for learning to read, and we propose a possible causal explanation of how a FMA deficit leads to specific reading disability, suggesting that sluggish FMA in dyslexic children could be caused by a specific parietal dysfunction.
KW - Multimodal attention
KW - Parietal cortex
KW - Reading
KW - Reading disability
KW - Spatial attention deficit
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M3 - Article
C2 - 15794032
AN - SCOPUS:17144399557
VL - 65
SP - 61
EP - 72
JO - Acta Neurobiologiae Experimentalis
JF - Acta Neurobiologiae Experimentalis
SN - 0065-1400
IS - 1
ER -