Impaired Serial Visual Search in Children with Developmental Dyslexia

Abstract

In order to test the hypothesis of attentional deficits in dyslexia, we investigated the performance of children with developmental dyslexia on a number of visual search tasks. When tested with conjunction tasks for orientation and form using complex, letter-like material, dyslexic children showed an increased number of errors accompanied by faster reaction times in comparison to control children matched to the dyslexics on age, gender, and intelligence. On conjunction tasks for orientation and color, dyslexic children were also less accurate, but showed slower reaction times than the age-matched control children. These differences between the two groups decreased with increasing age. In contrast to these differences, the performance of dyslexic children in feature search tasks was similar to that of control children. These results suggest that children with developmental dyslexia present selective deficits in complex serial visual search tasks, implying impairment in goal-directed, sustained visual attention.

The Effect of Dyslexia on Searching Visual and Textual Content: Are Icons Really Useful?

“…No significant differences were found between the two groups in the visual tasks, which may indicate that eye movements are more similar in the two user groups in such tasks. These findings contradict several studies which conclude that users with dyslexia are impaired in visual search tasks [10,11,12,13,14,15]. However, these differences may be due to experimental design, since this study did not follow the traditional search paradigm, but applied stimuli designed to resemble an icon-based graphical user interface.…”

“…However, dyslexia is often associated with visual perceptual deficits [9], and several studies have addressed the visual search skills among users with dyslexia. Most of this research follow the traditional visual search paradigm, where the user is presented with an odd target item, and then asked to decide whether the item is present or not in a display with several distractor items [10]. Performance measurements are typically reaction times and error rates.…”

“…Several experiments with standard visual search tasks have concluded that users with dyslexia are impaired in visual search tasks [10,11]. This impairment is found both in children [12] and adults [13].…”

Translating dyslexia across species

“…Although the exact link between visuo-spatial performance on this task and reading ability has yet to be determined, research indicates that children and adults with dyslexia exhibit impaired visual processing and attention (Facoetti et al, 2001;Gori & Facoetti, 2015;Sireteanu et al, 2008;Sireteanu, Goertz, Bachert, & Wandert, 2005;Menghini, Finzi, Carlesimo, & Vicari, 2011), and unsuccessful use of visual cues (Moores et al, 2011). Impaired visual processing and attention is thought to negatively impact a reader's graphemic parsing ability, which requires both visual spatial attention skills and phonological skills (Facoetti et al 2006(Facoetti et al , 2010Perry, Ziegler, & Zorzi, 2007).…”

“Shall We Play a Game?”: Improving Reading Through Action Video Games in Developmental Dyslexia

“…Reading disabled children presents slower search times than typical children when the search involves increasingly larger number of distractors (e.g. [29,75,76]). Moreover, serial visual search abilities at kindergarten resulted predictive of future reading skills at first and second grade of primary school [57•, 77, 78•].…”