Increased susceptibility to proactive interference in adults with dyslexia?

Abstract

Recent findings show that people with dyslexia have an impairment in serial-order memory. Based on these findings, the present study aimed to test the hypothesis that people with dyslexia have difficulties dealing with proactive interference (PI) in recognition memory. A group of 25 adults with dyslexia and a group of matched controls were subjected to a 2-back recognition task, which required participants to indicate whether an item (mis)matched the item that had been presented 2 trials before. PI was elicited using lure trials in which the item matched the item in the 3-back position instead of the targeted 2-back position. Our results demonstrate that the introduction of lure trials affected 2-back recognition performance more severely in the dyslexic group than in the control group, suggesting greater difficulty in resisting PI in dyslexia. ?? 2014 Taylor & Francis

The involvement of long-term serial-order memory in reading development: A longitudinal study

“…In line with the adult dyslexia data (Bogaerts et al, 2015;Szmalec et al, 2011) we also predicted that poor readers would display weaker Hebb learning compared with good readers, both in the verbal and the visuospatial stimulus modalities. (1b) Considering reading skill as a continuous variable, we predicted a positive relationship between both word and nonword reading scores and Hebb learning performance.…”

“…The demonstration of a deficit in a visuospatial task implies that Hebb-learning deficits in dyslexia extend beyond the verbal domain, and that a domain-general serial-order component may be the source of impairment. In support of this view, we recently showed that the learning deficit is persistent in the sense that drastically increasing the number of Hebb repetitions, thereby maximizing learning opportunity, does not mitigate the adverse effect of dyslexia on Hebb learning (Bogaerts, Szmalec, Hachmann, Page, & Duyck, 2015). The same study also suggested poorer lexicalization of verbal Hebb sequences in adults with dyslexia, suggesting that problems with serial-order learning may lead to impaired lexical representations, which are in turn assumed to affect reading performance (Perfetti, 2007).…”

“…The question of how memory supports language development has been a topic of wide scientific interest in the last decades (see Baddeley et al, 1998). An increasing number of studies suggest that both short-and long-term memory processes underlie various aspects of language development, such as vocabulary acquisition (e.g., Gathercole et al, 1999;Leclercq & Majerus, 2010;Page & Norris, 2009) and reading (e.g., Bogaerts et al, 2015, Martinez Perez et al, 2012b, Szmalec et al, 2011. In previous work, Szmalec and colleagues clarified the role of long-term serial-order learning in novel word-form acquisition (Szmalec et al, 2009(Szmalec et al, , 2012.…”

A sequence learning impairment in dyslexia? It depends on the task

“…interference. An alternative explanation could be that the adults with dyslexia showed an increased susceptibility to 'proactive interference' during the Hebb task (see also Bogaerts, Szmalec, Hachmann, Page, Woumans, & Duyck, 2015b). Proactive interference could have originated from the fact that the filler and Hebb lists were constructed from the same items, which means that participants' memory traces for previous items may have interfered with their ability to learn new memory traces, with this effect accumulating across trials.…”

A review of prospective memory impairments in developmental dyslexia: evidence, explanations, and future directions

“…Developmental dyslexia (henceforth, dyslexia) is characterized by core deficits in phonological processing (for reviews, see Castles & Friedmann, 2014;Vellutino, Fletcher, Snowling & Scanlon, 2004). Alongside its well-documented effects on the processes involved in reading and spelling, dyslexia has also been found to be associated with broader impairments in cognition (e.g., Booth, Boyle & Kelly, 2010;Bogaerts et al, 2015;Menghini, Finzi, Carlesimo & Vicari, 2011;Smith-Spark, Fisk, Fawcett & Nicolson, 2003;Smith-Spark, Henry, Messer, Edvardsdottir & Zięcik, 2016).…”