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Abstract:
Abstract: Reading disability is often associated with
low-level visual and auditory abnormalities, but the relation
between these abnormalities and reading is still unclear. To relate
perceptual abnormalities to reading, we tested the idea that rapid
and focused attentional shifts across space involves a skill that
develops with normal reading. Six normal readers, 3 native
left-to-right (English) and 3 native right-to-left (Hebrew), were
tested in a dual-task Gabor orientation identification, with two
patches presented simultaneously, one central (first task) and one
peripheral (second task), in different eccentricities along the
horizontal axis, followed by a bandpass noise mask. Threshold SOA
of the mask increased with eccentricity for the peripheral patches,
but with marked asymmetries between sides - the left-to-right
readers performed better in the right side, while the right-to-left
readers performed better on the left side. In comparison, smaller
or no asymmetries were found for a single peripheral patch, but
similar asymmetries were found for a dual-task with peripheral
fixation. These results are interpreted in terms of the speed of
serial focused attention control, which appears to develop with
normal reading. These findings suggest that abnormal low-level
perceptual skills are a result of abnormal reading development. It
is also consistent with the notion that rapid and focused
attentional shift between perceptual events is critical for normal
reading.
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