Exploring the relationship between dyslexia and visual spatial attention in secondary school students in Hong Kong

Increasing number of studies have investigated whether there are visual spatial attention deficits in patients with dyslexia (Facoetti, Turatto, Lorusso & Mascetti, 2001; Franceschini, Gori, Ruffino, Pedrolli & Facoetti, 2012; Giovagnoli, Vicari, Tomassetti& Menghini, 2016). Although many studies have shown that visual spatial attention has an important influence on reading ability, most of these studies focused primarily on alphabetic orthographies with instead on Chinese character recognition. Even with similar research, the subjects were limited to primary school (Liu, Pan & Xu, 2018). Using Posner's spatial cueing task, this study measured the exogenous and endogenous visual spatial attention among 44 secondary school students with dyslexia and non-dyslexia in Hong Kong in order to investigate whether this attentional deficit extend into secondary school. Our results suggested students with dyslexia were not able to show a cueing effect, whether it was a central cue or a peripheral cue, indicating that they had persistent deficits in in endogenous and exogenous visual-spatial attention. All rights reserved.