Beijing Key Laboratory of Learning and Cognition, School of Psychology, Capital Normal University (East Campus), Room B902, 23A, Fuwai Baiduizi, Haidian District, Beijing, China.
Exp Brain Res. 2021 Jun;239(6):1987-1999. doi: 10.1007/s00221-021-06115-7. Epub 2021 Apr 24.
Individuals with reading fluency difficulty (RFD) show an impairment in the simultaneous processing of multiple elements, which could be reflected in their visual attention span (VAS) capacity. However, the relationship between VAS impairment and RFD is still controversial. A series of processes underlie VAS, such as the early stage of visual attentional processing and the late stage of allocating and maintaining attentional resources. Therefore, the present study explored the relationships between VAS skills and RFD through the event-related potential (ERP) technique to disentangle the contributing cognitive processes regarding VAS from a temporal perspective. Eighteen Chinese adults with poor reading fluency and 18 age-matched normal readers participated. Their VAS skills were measured by a visual one-back task with symbols as nonverbal stimuli and key pressing as nonverbal responses, while relevant electrophysiological signals were recorded. The results showed that lower d' values and abnormal electrophysiological activities (especially weak amplitudes in the N1 and P3 components) in the VAS task were observed for the nonfluent readers compared with the controls. These findings suggested that the low VAS capacity in adults with poor reading fluency could be reflected by problems both in directing selective attention to visually discriminate stimuli within a multielement string at the early processing stage and in allocating attention to further encode targets at the late processing stage. Alternative explanations were further discussed. The current results provide theoretical explanations of the VAS-RFD relationship from a temporal perspective and provide insights for future remediation of reading fluency difficulty.
个体在阅读流畅性方面存在困难（RFD），表现出在同时处理多个元素方面的障碍，这可能反映在他们的视觉注意力跨度（VAS）能力上。然而，VAS 损伤与 RFD 之间的关系仍然存在争议。VAS 涉及一系列的过程，例如视觉注意力处理的早期阶段和分配和维持注意力资源的晚期阶段。因此，本研究通过事件相关电位（ERP）技术探索了 VAS 技能与 RFD 之间的关系，从时间的角度来区分 VAS 涉及的认知过程。18 名阅读流畅性较差的中国成年人和 18 名年龄匹配的正常阅读者参加了研究。他们的 VAS 技能通过符号作为非言语刺激和按键作为非言语反应的视觉 1 背任务来测量，同时记录相关的电生理信号。结果表明，与对照组相比，非流畅阅读者在 VAS 任务中表现出较低的 d'值和异常的电生理活动（特别是在 N1 和 P3 成分中振幅较弱）。这些发现表明，阅读流畅性较差的成年人的低 VAS 能力可能反映在早期处理阶段对多元素字符串中的视觉辨别刺激进行选择性注意的问题，以及在晚期处理阶段对进一步编码目标进行注意力分配的问题。进一步讨论了替代解释。目前的结果从时间的角度提供了 VAS-RFD 关系的理论解释，并为未来阅读流畅性困难的矫正提供了见解。
