A Causal Link between Visual Spatial Attention and Reading Acquisition

Abstract

Reading is a unique, cognitive human skill crucial to life in modern societies, but, for about 10% of the children, learning to read is extremely difficult. They are affected by a neurodevelopmental disorder called dyslexia. Although impaired auditory and speech sound processing is widely assumed to characterize dyslexic individuals, emerging evidence suggests that dyslexia could arise from a more basic cross-modal letter-to-speech sound integration deficit. Letters have to be precisely selected from irrelevant and cluttering letters by rapid orienting of visual attention before the correct letter-to-speech sound integration applies. Here we ask whether prereading visual parietal-attention functioning may explain future reading emergence and development. The present 3 year longitudinal study shows that prereading attentional orienting--assessed by serial search performance and spatial cueing facilitation--captures future reading acquisition skills in grades 1 and 2 after controlling for age, nonverbal IQ, speech-sound processing, and nonalphabetic cross-modal mapping. Our findings provide the first evidence that visual spatial attention in preschoolers specifically predicts future reading acquisition, suggesting new approaches for early identification and efficient prevention of dyslexia.

Individual Differences in Adult Reading Are Associated with Left Temporo-parietal to Dorsal Striatal Functional Connectivity

“…Alternative theories have suggested that RD is rooted in abnormalities in visual processing (Demb et al 1998) and visualspatial attention (Facoetti et al 2000;Franceschini et al 2012). In the present study, right hemisphere connectivity between AG and pericalcarine cortex positively correlated with phonemic decoding.…”

“…Many studies have highlighted abnormalities in visuospatial attention in RD (Facoetti and Molteni 2001;Hari et al 2001;Facoetti et al 2003Facoetti et al , 2006Sireteanu et al 2005;Liddle et al 2009;Facoetti, Corradi et al 2010;Facoetti, Trussardi et al 2010). Converging evidence also suggests that difficulties in visuospatial attention are an important predictor of reading abilities (Valdois et al 2004;Shaywitz and Shaywitz 2008;Franceschini et al 2012Franceschini et al , 2013. Reading remediation (Franceschini et al 2013) may rely largely on alterations in visual or auditory attentional functions of the dorsal attention network (Ronconi et al 2014).…”

“…Another theory of RD posits dysfunction in the magnocellular system as part of the dorsal visual processing stream (Demb et al 1998). The dorsal visual processing stream has been argued to contain dorsal and ventral subdivisions, where the dorsal portion (d-d) includes the intraparietal sulcus and the ventral portion (v-d) includes inferior parietal regions encompassed by the TPJ (Rizzolatti and Matelli 2003); abnormal connectivity along this pathway may relate to visuospatial and visual processing deficits seen in RD (Demb et al 1998;Franceschini et al 2012). Portions of the TPJ are structurally and functionally connected to the dorsal attention network.…”

Attentional modulation of the carry over of eye-movements between tasks

“…It is thought to be subsumed by the anterior cingulate cortex (Dosenbach et al, 2006(Dosenbach et al, , 2007. Deficits in attentional processing seem to be linked to some important neurodevelopmental disorders such as dyslexia and autism spectrum disorder (Franceschini, Gori, Ruffino, Pedrolli, & Facoetti, 2012;Franceschini, Gori, Ruffino, Viola, Molteni, & Facoetti, 2013;Ronconi, Gori, Giora, Ruffino, Molteni, & Facoetti. 2013;Gori, Cecchini, Bigoni, Molteni, & Facoetti, 2015, for review see: Vidyasagar & Pammer, 2010).…”

Manipulation of Attention in Children with Reading

“…Also proposed is that a causal link exists between reading deficits and phonologic problems involving the capture of auditory and visual automatic attention. There is evidence pointing to the presence of a cross-modal letter-to-speech sound integration deficit [7]. Facoetti, Lorusso, Cattaneo, Galli and Molteni suggest that focused spatial attention (FSA), a crucial factor affecting multimodal perceptual processing efficiency, enhances neural representation of the attended stimuli by faster reaction times, improved sensitivity and reduced flanker effect [8].…”