Abstract
This critical review examined current issues to do with the role of visual attention in reading. To do this, we searched for and reviewed 18 recent articles, including all that were found after 2019 and used a Latin alphabet. Inspection of these articles showed that the Visual Attention Span task was run a number of times in well-controlled studies and was typically a small but significant predictor of reading ability, even after potential covariation with phonological effects were accounted for. A number of other types of tasks were used to examine different aspects of visual attention, with differences between dyslexic readers and controls typically found. However, most of these studies did not adequately control for phonological effects, and of those that did, only very weak and non-significant results were found. Furthermore, in the smaller studies, separate within-group correlations between the tasks and reading performance were generally not provided, making causal effects of the manipulations difficult to ascertain. Overall, it seems reasonable to suggest that understanding how and why different types of visual tasks affect particular aspects of reading performance is an important area for future research.
Highlights
Visual attention is an important part of reading and deficits related to it have been commonly implicated in dyslexia [1–3]
One of the larger studies examining visual attention that met our gold standard of using a phonological awareness (PA) and rapid naming (RAN) task as controls was by Cirino et al [20]
They looked at 90 students who were at a high risk of having a reading disorder using letter, number, and Hiragana stimuli with a VAS, visual search, attentional blink, and an Inhibition of return (IOR)
Summary
Visual attention is an important part of reading and deficits related to it have been commonly implicated in dyslexia [1–3]. The main goal was to examine the extent to which researchers have converged on particular types of experiments and experimental designs that can be used to examine visual attention and how it interacts with specific processes involved in reading This is important because numerous tasks have been historically used. It is very well established that different types of deficits in reading are significantly correlated [4], even if they might seem conceptually separate (e.g., visual and phonological deficits) This includes data from large samples [4,5]. If a child shows normal performance on a RAN task but poor performance on a visual task, with other supporting evidence, one might conclude that they are a slow reader because of a visual deficit. If mean differences are found between groups but there are no significant correlations within groups, it may indicate that one group tends to be competent at most tasks and the other group less competent at most tasks
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