Developmental and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, Department of General Psychology, University of Padua, Via Venezia 8, 35131, Padua, Italy.
Child Neuropsychiatry Unit, Department of Medicine and Surgery, University of Insubria, Varese, Italy.
Sci Rep. 2022 Aug 17;12(1):13930. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-16646-w.
Although developmental reading disorders (developmental dyslexia) have been mainly associated with auditory-phonological deficits, recent longitudinal and training studies have shown a possible causal role of visuo-attentional skills in reading acquisition. Indeed, visuo-attentional mechanisms could be involved in the orthographic processing of the letter string and the graphemic parsing that precede the grapheme-to-phoneme mapping. Here, we used a simple paper-and-pencil task composed of three labyrinths to measure visuo-spatial attention in a large sample of primary school children (n = 398). In comparison to visual search tasks requiring visual working memory, our labyrinth task mainly measures distributed and focused visuo-spatial attention, also controlling for sensorimotor learning. Compared to typical readers (n = 340), children with reading difficulties (n = 58) showed clear visuo-spatial attention impairments that appear not linked to motor coordination and procedural learning skills implicated in this paper and pencil task. Since visual attention is dysfunctional in about 40% of the children with reading difficulties, an efficient reading remediation program should integrate both auditory-phonological and visuo-attentional interventions.
尽管发育性阅读障碍（发育性诵读困难）主要与听觉-语音缺陷有关，但最近的纵向和训练研究表明，视知觉技能在阅读习得中可能起因果作用。事实上，视知觉机制可能参与了字母串的正字法处理和图形分析，而图形分析则先于字符到音素的映射。在这里，我们使用了一个简单的纸笔任务，由三个迷宫组成，在一个大规模的小学生样本（n=398）中测量视空间注意力。与需要视觉工作记忆的视觉搜索任务相比，我们的迷宫任务主要测量分布式和集中式的视空间注意力，同时也控制了感觉运动学习。与典型读者（n=340）相比，阅读困难的儿童（n=58）表现出明显的视空间注意力障碍，这些障碍似乎与该纸笔任务中涉及的运动协调和程序性学习技能无关。由于约 40%的阅读困难儿童存在视觉注意力障碍，因此有效的阅读矫正计划应同时包括听觉-语音和视知觉干预。
