Prospective Memory In Adults With Developmental Dyslexia

Abstract

While short-term and working memory deficits in individuals with dyslexia are well documented, the effects of dyslexia on prospective memory (PM) have been neglected. A range of PM measures were administered to different samples of university students with and without dyslexia (typically N = 50, 25 per group, matched for age and IQ, and differing on reading and spelling measures). Questionnaire data indicated that individuals with dyslexia perceived themselves as significantly worse on everyday PM activities than non-dyslexics. These data were corroborated by ratings taken from close friends/relatives of the participants. Naturalistic data revealed that adults with dyslexia performed more poorly on a time-based task involving a delay of 40 minutes and 24 hours and an event-based PM task involving a one week delay. There were no event-based PM deficits in dyslexia in the experimental tasks. However, adults with dyslexia were significantly worse at time-based tasks. Difficulties with PM would, therefore, seem to be evident in adults with dyslexia and tend to manifest themselves in time-based PM tasks. This interpretation is consistent with executive functioning problems associated with dyslexia and theories that take a broader view of dyslexia than phonological processing alone.