Books and Bias: The Relationship Between Visuo-spatial Attention Bias and Reading Skills in Children

Abstract

Visuo-spatial attention is a cognitive function that allows humans to attend to and process stimuli in their surrounding space. Interestingly, neurotypical children have been shown to display a spatial attention bias toward the left visual field, while dyslexic children (i.e., children with a reading disorder characterized by deficits in phonological processing and/or reading fluency) have been shown to display a relatively rightward spatial attention bias. Researchers have speculated that the leftward spatial bias in young children may be driven by their beginning reading education in languages that are read from left to right. Here, I investigated whether spatial bias may be related to the acquisition of reading skills among a sample of the general population of children in grades 1 to 3. I assessed the relationship between spatial bias and reading performance on measures of reading fluency and word-identification skills. I found that a leftward spatial bias predicts reading fluency but not word identification skills. This is the first empirical investigation to directly show that spatial bias predicts reading skills. The finding has important implications for understanding the potential role of spatial bias in reading and dyslexia, as well as for potentially developing novel interventions to improve reading fluency among children struggling with this skill.