Attentional processes and dyslexia

Abstract

This review of attentional processes related to dyslexia examines the nature of the "attention" needed to acquire reading skills and proposes a definition of attention that combines elements of neurobiology and neuropsychology. Evidence for a relationship between reading problems and deficits in auditory and/or visual processing circuitry, which could be labelled "attentional deficits" is then outlined, and the final section reports research on possible underlying causes of the deficits from the fields of visual perceptual processing, neurophysiology, and neuroanatomy, and advances in the field of nonlinear dynamical theory, which may contribute eventually to our understanding of the temporal dynamics of neural systems in which "attention" is currently thought to play a part.

Learning Disability Subtypes and the Role of Attention During the Naming of Pictures and Words: An Event-Related Potential Analysis

“…There is a consensus that measures of vigilance or sustained attention, attentional capacity, and level of arousal do not differentiate between children with learning disabilities (LDs) and children without LDs (Pennington, Groisser, & Welsh, 1993;Samuels & Edwall, 1981;Whyte, 1994). There are, however, some reports that measures of selective attention to visual and auditory information do identify children with LDs.…”

Long-Term Effectiveness of Dolphin-Assisted Therapy for Children with Severe Disabilities

“…In dyslexics, for example, visual spatial frequency may account for attention deficits (Rayner et al 1989;Solman and Cho 1991). Frontal lobe impairment (Baddeley 1986;Galaburda 1989) and neuronal size (Whyte 1994) have also been advanced as possible attention deficit etiologies among dyslexics. Research in the cognitive neuropsychology of attention has investigated specific disorders of mental retardation and frontal lobe function, even though attention is not a unitary function (O'Mara and Walsh 1994).…”

A Review for Existing Complementary and Alternative Medical Therapies for Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…By assisting those individuals finding cues of stimuli and being exposed under that condition long enough, triggered learning behaviors may be observed [17] [21] . This theory is later extended to neurological perspectives that attention deficit may also be caused by visual spatial frequency [29] [32] , frontal lobe impairment [3] [12] , and neuronal size [40] . Operant research has long been discovered and applied which turned out to be relatively effective among all methods for individuals with severe disabilities [20] [11] .…”