description) This project will examine the role of attention in reading impairment and its remediation. Dyslexia and ADHD commonly appear in the same children; however, the reason for this overlap is not fully understood. The goal of these investigators will be to examine attentional mechanisms in a known population of reading impaired (RI) children and to determine if they reflect deficits in specific attention networks. Whether or not attentional deficits are an important cause of reading impairment, they hope to determine how attention can enhance acquisition of the reading skill by RI children. This work will assess RI and non-impaired children on three separate component networks of attention: the ability to develop and maintain an alert state, goal directed orienting of attention, and conflict resolution. Initial work will quantify these attention mechanisms with a reaction-time test battery that focuses on visual-spatial processes. Additional work will adopt these techniques for ERP studies in the visual/spatial and auditory/temporal domain. Orienting attention to particular aspects of stimuli not only activates domain-general attention networks, but also modifies activity in areas specifically related to the attended information. They will adopt existing fMRI techniques designed to separate attentional modulation vs. stimulus-driven activity and apply these techniques to component skills in the domain of reading. They will examine the hypothesis that reading impaired children have difficulty using attention to modify activity in cortical regions corresponding to critical computations of reading. For example, children demonstrating symptoms of phonological dyslexia may be unable to use attention to modulate activity in dorsal regions (posterior extent of the left superior temporal gyrus). They believe that the focus of the subjects? attention during training will largely determine what is learned and how well it is learned. By encouraging subjects to orient their attention to different information as they learn new reading materials (children learning new words or adults learning new writing systems), these investigators will examine how orienting to different information influences learning-related activity in dorsal and ventral cortical regions associated with reading skill. They will examine how learning to read influences the brain?s attention system. Reports of differences between the effects of brain lesions on illiterate and literate adults give rise to the possibility that learning to read alters the organization of the cerebral hemispheres in a way that will be reflected in the deployment of attention networks.
| Estrada, Eduardo; Ferrer, Emilio; Shaywitz, Bennett A et al. (2018) Identifying atypical change at the individual level from childhood to adolescence. Dev Psychol 54:2193-2206 |
| Lebel, Catherine; Shaywitz, Bennett; Holahan, John et al. (2013) Diffusion tensor imaging correlates of reading ability in dysfluent and non-impaired readers. Brain Lang 125:215-22 |
| Ferrer, Emilio; Shaywitz, Bennett A; Holahan, John M et al. (2010) Uncoupling of reading and IQ over time: empirical evidence for a definition of dyslexia. Psychol Sci 21:93-101 |
| Shaywitz, Sally E; Shaywitz, Bennett A (2008) Paying attention to reading: the neurobiology of reading and dyslexia. Dev Psychopathol 20:1329-49 |
| Shaywitz, Sally E; Morris, Robin; Shaywitz, Bennett A (2008) The education of dyslexic children from childhood to young adulthood. Annu Rev Psychol 59:451-75 |
| Noble, Kimberly G; McCandliss, Bruce D; Farah, Martha J (2007) Socioeconomic gradients predict individual differences in neurocognitive abilities. Dev Sci 10:464-80 |
| Shaywitz, Sally E; Gruen, Jeffrey R; Shaywitz, Bennett A (2007) Management of dyslexia, its rationale, and underlying neurobiology. Pediatr Clin North Am 54:609-23, viii |
| Shaywitz, Bennett A; Skudlarski, Pawel; Holahan, John M et al. (2007) Age-related changes in reading systems of dyslexic children. Ann Neurol 61:363-70 |
| Burgio-Murphy, Andrea; Klorman, Rafael; Shaywitz, Sally E et al. (2007) Error-related event-related potentials in children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, reading disorder, and math disorder. Biol Psychol 75:75-86 |
| Noble, Kimberly G; Wolmetz, Michael E; Ochs, Lisa G et al. (2006) Brain-behavior relationships in reading acquisition are modulated by socioeconomic factors. Dev Sci 9:642-54 |
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