Attentional deficit in dyslexia: a general or specific impairment?

Dyslexic and control children were tested in a visuomotor attentional task, which provides independent measures of the alerting, orienting and conflict components of the attentional system. Our results show that dyslexics are impaired with respect to controls in the attentional conflict component (resolution of conflict of incongruent peripheral information), while the alerting and orienting components remain preserved. It excludes an overall attentional impairment and points to more specific attentional processing difficulty i.e. distributed attention strategy. Generally, results of dyslexic boys are within the range of the control group, while reaction times of dyslexic girls are significantly slower than that of all other groups.