title: Visual and auditory attentional capture are both sluggish in children with developmental dyslexia.
abstract: Automatic multimodal spatial attention was studied in 12 dyslexic children (SRD), 18 chronological age matched (CA) and 9 reading level matched (RL) normally reading children by measuring reaction times (RTs) to lateralized visual and auditory stimuli in cued detection tasks. The results show a slower time course of focused multimodal attention (FMA) in SRD children than in both CA and RL controls. Specifically, no cueing effect (i.e., RTs difference between cued-uncued) was found in SRD children at 100 ms cue-target delay, while it was present at 250 ms cue-target delay. In contrast, in both CA and RL controls, a cueing effect was found at the shorter cue-target delay but it disappeared at the longer cue-target delay, as predicted by theories of automatic capture of attention. Our results suggest that FMA may be crucial for learning to read, and we propose a possible causal explanation of how a FMA deficit leads to specific reading disability, suggesting that sluggish FMA in dyslexic children could be caused by a specific parietal dysfunction.
authors.affiliation: Scientific Institute 'E Medea' of Bosisio P, Lecco, Italy. andreafacoetti@unipd.it.
authors.forename: Andrea
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Facoetti
authors.forename: Maria Luisa
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Lorusso
authors.forename: Carmen
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Cattaneo
authors.forename: Raffaella
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Galli
authors.forename: Massimo
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Molteni
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D002648:Child; D004410:Dyslexia / Q000503:physiopathology*; D006801:Humans; D010296:Parietal Lobe / Q000503:physiopathology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*