Dyslexia Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Dyslexia, including details on learning, reading, education, teaching, treatment.

Attentional blink differences between adolescent dyslexic and normal readers.

Lacroix GL, Constantinescu I, Cousineau D, de Almeida RG, Segalowitz N, Grünau M

Department of Psychology, Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance, Concordia University, 7141 Sherbrooke Street West, Montréal, Que., Canada H4B 1R6. glacroix@education.concordia.ca

The goal of this study was to evaluate the possibility that dyslexic individuals require more working memory resources than normal readers to shift attention from stimulus to stimulus. To test this hypothesis, normal and dyslexic adolescents participated in a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation experiment (Raymond, Shapiro, & Arnell, 1992). Surprisingly, the result showed that the participants with dyslexia produced a shallower attentional blink than normal controls. This result may be interpreted as showing differences in the way the two groups encode information in episodic memory. They also fit in a cascade-effect perspective of developmental dyslexia.

Published 14 February 2005 in Brain Cogn, 57(2): 115-9.
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