Visual and Auditory Interference Control of Attention in Developmental Dyslexia

Abstract

An accumulating body of evidence highlights the contribution of general cognitive processes, such as attention, to language-related skills.Objective:The purpose of the present study was to explore how interference control (a subcomponent of selective attention) is affected in developmental dyslexia (DD) by means of control over simple stimulus-response mappings. Furthermore, we aimed to examine interference control in adults with DD across sensory modalities.Methods:The performance of 14 dyslexic adults and 14 matched controls was compared on visual/auditory Simon tasks, in which conflict was presented in terms of an incongruent mapping between the location of a visual/auditory stimulus and the appropriate motor response.Results:In the auditory task, dyslexic participants exhibited larger Simon effect costs; namely, they showed disproportionately larger reaction times (RTs)/errors costs when the auditory stimulus and response were incongruent relative to RT/errors costs of non-impaired readers. In the visual Simon task, both groups presented Simon effect costs to the same extent.Conclusion:These results indicate that the ability to control auditory selective attention is carried out less effectively in those with DD compared with visually controlled processing. The implications of this impaired process for the language-related skills of individuals with DD are discussed.

Public misconceptions about dyslexia: The role of intuitive psychology

“…Dyslexia, to be clear, compromises not only reading but also speech perception [ 11 ]. Other research has documented difficulties in visual perception [ 12 , 13 ], phonemic awareness [ 7 ], attention and working memory [ 14 ], morphological processing [ 15 ], and text comprehension [ 16 ]. Nonetheless, in orthographies like English, where the mapping from letters to sounds is not fully predictable, phonological decoding from print is, by far, the most common symptom of dyslexia [ 1 , 9 ].…”

Electrophysiological correlates of phonological and temporal regularities in speech processing

“…However, this study investigated pre-stimulus alpha ITC, and required children to direct their attention toward the visual speech stimuli which preceded the auditory onset, thus highlighting impairments in endogenous attentional control, rather than involuntary attention switches. Studies of auditory interference control of attention in dyslexia are rare (Gabay et al, 2020), thus this interpretation warrants follow up investigations.…”

“…Given the temporal overlap of the increased delta/theta ITC with both the MMN and the P3 window (Figure 6), it is also possible that this effect reflects an involuntary attention switch to evaluate the perceptual change (Fitzgerald & Todd, 2020), which may be increased in the dyslexic group. Indeed, increased theta ITC has been previously associated with an attentional shift in participants hearing their own name (Tamura et al, 2015), and some evidence points toward impaired auditory attentional interference control in dyslexic readers (Gabay et al, 2020), which may render them more susceptible to involuntary attention switching. This differs from recent reports of decreased attentional shifting to upcoming stimuli in dyslexic children in an audiovisual oddball paradigm (Meyer & Schaadt, 2020).…”

An Evolutionary Perspective of Dyslexia, Stress, and Brain Network Homeostasis

“…Behavioral research has shown that individuals with dyslexia are poorer in aspects of both VAN/DAN functions (Goldfarb and Shaul, 2013;Gabay et al, 2020), and imaging studies with children and adults with dyslexia have reported weaker encoding of the delta band (Power et al, 2013(Power et al, , 2016Soltesz et al, 2013). Testing for oscillations by hemisphere interactions, multiple studies have converged in identifying the right hemisphere as the source of the atypical encoding of the low auditory frequencies in dyslexia (Hamalainen et al, 2012;Lizarazu et al, 2015;Cutini et al, 2016;Molinaro et al, 2016;Di Liberato et al, 2018) (for a review, see Kershner, 2020b).…”