Children with dyslexia show no deficit in exogenous spatial attention but show differences in visual encoding

Abstract

In the search for mechanisms that contribute to dyslexia, the term “attention” has been invoked to explain performance in a variety of tasks, creating confusion since all tasks do, indeed, demand “attention.” Many studies lack an experimental manipulation of attention that would be necessary to determine its influence on task performance. Nonetheless, an emerging view is that children with dyslexia have an impairment in the exogenous (automatic/reflexive) orienting of spatial attention. Here we investigated the link between exogenous attention and reading ability by presenting exogenous spatial cues in the multi‐letter processing task—a task relevant for reading. The task was gamified and administered online to a large sample of children (N = 187) between 6 and 17 years. Children with dyslexia performed worse overall at rapidly recognizing and reporting strings of letters. However, we found no evidence for a difference in the utilization of exogenous spatial cues, resolving two decades of ambiguity in the field. Previous studies that claimed otherwise may have failed to distinguish attention effects from overall task performance or found spurious group differences in small samples.Research HighlightsWe manipulated exogenous visual spatial attention using pre‐cues in a task that is relevant for reading and we see robust task effects of exogenous attention.We found no evidence for a deficit in utilizing exogenous spatial pre‐cues in children with dyslexia.However, children with dyslexia showed reduced recognition ability for all letter positions.Children with dyslexia were just as likely to make letter transposition errors as typical readers.