Visual target detection is not impaired in dyslexic readers.
In two previous studies we assessed a difficulty of dyslexic readers with letter string processing by using variants of the partial report paradigm, e.g., Averbach and Coriell [Averbach, E., & Coriell, A. S. (1961). Short-term memory in vision. Bell Systems Technical Journal, 40, 309-328] which requires report of a letter name in response to a position cue. The poor dyslexic performance was interpreted as evidence for a visual-attentional deficit of dyslexic readers. In the present study, we avoided verbal report by using a task which only required the detection of predefined targets (letters or pseudoletters) in strings. On this purely visual task, the dyslexic readers did not differ from non-impaired readers. This finding speaks against a basic visual-attentional deficit; rather it suggests that the dyslexic deficit on partial report paradigms stems from a problem in establishing a string representation which includes position and name codes.
Hawelka
Stefan
S
Wimmer
Heinz
H
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D004410:Dyslexia / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011932:Reading