Poor Performance on Serial Visual Tasks in Persons With Reading Disabilities

Abstract

The present study investigates the performance of persons with reading disabilities (PRD) on a variety of sequential visual-comparison tasks that have different working-memory requirements. In addition, mediating relationships between the sequential comparison process and attention and memory skills were looked for. Our findings suggest that PRD perform worse than normally achieving readers (NAR) when the task requires more than a minimal amount of working memory, unrelated to presentation rate. We also demonstrate high correlations between performance on the task with the most working-memory demands and reading-related skills, suggesting that poor working-memory abilities may be one of the underlying mechanisms of dyslexia. The mediating model analysis indicates that order judgment tasks are mediating to verbal working memory, suggesting that visual sequence memory precedes auditory sequence memory. We further suggest that visual tasks involving sequential comparisons could probe for poor working memory in PRD.

Encoding order and developmental dyslexia: A family of skills predicting different orthographic components

“…There is no need to encode serial order in the simultaneous condition. Consistent with this interpretation, Ram-Tsur et al (2008) found that the dyslexics performed even worse when the task involved deciding which one out of three sequentially presented displays differed from the other two 4 …”

“…It has been found that dyslexics are impaired in comparing dynamic visual stimuli (patches of flickering lines, flickering sinusoidal gratings) only when the stimuli are presented sequentially , one after the other, but not when they are presented simultaneously , next to one another (Ben-Yehudah & Ahissar, 2004; Ben-Yehudah, Sackett, Malchi-Ginzberg, & Ahissar, 2001; Ram-Tsur, Faust, & Zivotofsky, 2006; Ram-Tsur et al, 2008). We would argue that the sequential conditions of these tasks require a high level of temporal order encoding because one has to remember which one of a series of repeated displays was presented last.…”

Sequential Versus Simultaneous Processing Deficits in Developmental Dyslexia

“…As with in the auditory modality however, findings revealed that visual temporal order judgment impairments of dyslexic participants did not depend upon the ISI duration (Ramwww.intechopen.com Tsur et al, 2006;Ram-Tsur, Faust, & Zivotofsky, 2008). Some studies even failed to show any disorder of this kind (Laasonen Tomma-Halme, Lahti-Nuuttila, Service, & Virsu., 2000, Lassonen et al, 2001.…”

Auditory Temporal Processing as a Specific Deficit Among Dyslexic Readers

“…In shallow orthography, the words are dotted creating high spelling-to-sound correspondence, and in deep orthography, the words are undotted, creating a low spelling-to-sound correspondence (Frost, 1994). In this task, we used reading regular and undotted words (For a detailed explanation about punctuation in Hebrew, see Ram-Tsur, Faust, & Zivotofsky, 2008). This task was designed to measure the amount of correct words per minute the participant is able to read.…”