Distributed and focused visuo‑spatial attention deficits in children with dyslexia

Although developmental dyslexia have been mainly associated with auditory-phonological deficits, recent longitudinal and training studies have shown a possible causal role of visuo-attentional skills in reading acquisition. Indeed, visuo-attentional mechanisms could be involved in the orthographic processing of the letter string and the graphemic parsing that precede the grapheme-to-phoneme mapping. Here, we used a simple paper-and-pencil task composed of three labyrinths to measure visuo-spatial attention in a large sample of primary school children (n= 398). In comparison to visual search tasks requiring visual working memory, our labyrinth task mainly measures distributed and focused visuo-spatial attention, also controlling for sensorimotor learning. Compared to typical readers (n= 340), children with reading difficulties (n= 58) showed clear visuo-spatial attention impairments not linked to motor coordination and procedural learning skills. Since visual attention is dysfunctional in about 40% of the children with reading difficulties, an efficient reading remediation program should integrate both auditory-phonological and visuo-attentional interventions.