VISUAL SELECTIVE ATTENTION AND READING EFFICIENCY ARE RELATED IN CHILDREN

We investigated the relationship between visual selective attention an d linguistic performance. Subjects were classified in four categories according to their accuracy in a letter cancellation task involving se lective attention. The task consisted in searching a target letter in a set of background letters and accuracy was measured as a function of set size. We found that children with the lowest performance in the c ancellation task present a significantly slower reading rate and a hig her number of reading visual errors than children with highest perform ance. Results also show that these groups of searchers present signifi cant differences in a lexical search task whereas their performance di d not differ in lexical decision and syllables control task. The relat ionship between letter search and reading, as well as the finding that poor readers-searchers perform poorly lexical search tasks also invol ving selective attention, suggest that the relationship between letter search and reading difficulty may reflect a deficit in a visual selec tive attention mechanisms which is involved in all these tasks. A defi cit in visual attention can be linked to the problems that disabled re aders present in the function of magnocellular stream which culminates in posterior parietal cortex, an area which plays an important role i n guiding visual attention.