title: Devil in the details? Developmental dyslexia and visual long-term memory for details.
abstract: Cognitive theories on causes of developmental dyslexia can be divided into language-specific and general accounts. While the former assume that words are special in that associated processing problems are rooted in language-related cognition (e.g., phonology) deficits, the latter propose that dyslexia is rather rooted in a general impairment of cognitive (e.g., visual and/or auditory) processing streams. In the present study, we examined to what extent dyslexia (typically characterized by poor orthographic representations) may be associated with a general deficit in visual long-term memory (LTM) for details. We compared object- and detail-related visual LTM performance (and phonological skills) between dyslexic primary school children and IQ-, age-, and gender-matched controls. The results revealed that while the overall amount of LTM errors was comparable between groups, dyslexic children exhibited a greater portion of detail-related errors. The results suggest that not only phonological, but also general visual resolution deficits in LTM may play an important role in developmental dyslexia.
authors: Institute of Psychology, Würzburg University Würzburg, Germany ; Institute of Psychology, RWTH Aachen University Aachen, Germany.
authors: Lynn
authors: L
authors: Huestegge
authors: Institute of Psychology, RWTH Aachen University Aachen, Germany.
authors: Julia
authors: J
authors: Rohrßen
authors: Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, Uniklinik RWTH Aachen Aachen, Germany ; SRH University of Applied Sciences for Health Gera, Germany.
authors: Muna
authors: M
authors: van Ermingen-Marbach
authors: Section Clinical and Cognitive Neurosciences, Department of Neurology, Medical School, RWTH Aachen University Aachen, Germany.
authors: Julia
authors: J
authors: Pape-Neumann
authors: Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, Uniklinik RWTH Aachen Aachen, Germany ; Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1), Research Centre Jülich Jülich, Germany ; JARA - Translational Brain Medicine Jülich and Aachen, Germany.
authors: Stefan
authors: S
authors: Heim
keywords: language and word processing; memory errors; orthographic representations; phonology and reading; picture processing; visual resolution deficit