Impaired processing of rapid stimulus sequences in dyslexia

“Analyses of attentional influences in clinical populations, as in Specific Language Impairment (SLI) or developmental dyslexia, brought forward the Sluggish Attentional Shifting Hypothesis (Hari and Renvall, 2001; Lallier et al., 2010) which suggests that dyslectic patients suffer from a prolonged cognitive integratio…”

“…& Talcott, 1999); the cerebellar deficit hypothesis (for review, see Nicolson et al., 2000; Nicolson, Fawcett, & Dean, 2001); the double-deficit hypothesis (for review, see Wolf, 1986); and the attentional dwell time hypothesis (for review, see Hari, Vlata, & Uutela, 1999; Hari & Renvall, 2001).”

“…tendency not to focus visual attention as much as normal readers (Facoetti, Paganoni, & Lorusso, 2000; Facoetti, Paganoni, Turatto, Marzola, & Mascetti, 2000) and a general attentional deficit across visual and auditory modalities, related to ‘‘sluggish attentional shifts’’ (Hari & Renvall, 2001).”

“Nevertheless, the wide range of DD difficulties has led researchers to search for other more basic deficits than reading which may underlie DD (Hari & Renvall, 2001; Nicolson & Fawcett, 1990; Stein & Walsh, 1997).”

“We have earlier suggested that such prolongation could distort processing of rapid stimulus sequences and the proper development of cortical representations needed for reading acquisition.(8) Abrupt sounds alert the subject and elicit in her auditory cortices transient responses that can be studied selectively with ma…”

“The latter was suggested as the `̀ pathophysiological link between neural-level disorders and behavioral deficits in dyslexic subjects that can impair the processing of rapid stimulus sequences in all sensory modalities'' (Hari and Renvall 2001, page 531).”

“This conceptualization is consistent with hypotheses of poor selective attention as well as hypotheses of increased noise sensitivity (Hari & Renvall, 2001; Sperling et al., 2005, 2006).”

“At the functional level, there is evidence for involvement of parietal areas in both memory (visual, Reinvang et al., 1998; and verbal, Jonides et al., 1998) and attentional tasks (Hari & Renvall, 2001).”

“Hari and Renvall (2001) have argued that poor performance on rapid sequential processing tasks is a measure of 'sluggish attentional shifting', an effect predicted to occur in the PPC.”

“They also suggest – in line with other studies (Hari & Renvall, 2001 ; McBride-Chang & Manis, 1996 ) – that visual and attention skills are also involved in reading development.”

“…level, we recently suggested that regulation of stimulus-driven automatic attention could serve as the causal link between the magnocellular deficit and the observed temporal processing problems at the time scales of up to a few hundreds of milliseconds (Hari & Renvall, 2001; Hari et al., 2001).”

“The visual stream segregation was used in conjunction with an auditory stream segregation to assess the “sluggish attentional shifting” (SAS) hypothesis (Lallier et al., 2009) suggested by Hari and Renvall (2001).”

“A deficit of auditory temporal processing has been suggested as a symptom in disorders as diverse as dyslexia [2] and autism [3].”

“Hari and Renvall (2001) [Hari, R. & Renvall, H. (2001).”

“It has repeatedly been suggested that this pansensory temporal impairment is caused by a deficit in magnocellular system [5,7,14], as magnocells are specialized in”

“In the same way, sluggish attentional shifting [5] and attention orienting disorders [10] typically co-occur with phonological disorders in DD [11–14].”

“Individuals with dyslexia show impaired EF such as inhibition, working memory (Brosnan et al., 2002), and shifting (Hari & Renvall, 2001), among others.”

“…the magnocellular visual system implicated in visual motion perception, oculomotor control, and spatial attention [Eden et al., 1996; Galaburda, 1993; Hari and Renvall, 2001; Stein, 2001]1, and (iii) a defective functioning of the cerebellum and of the skill-learning system [Nicolson et al., 2001].”

“…that can include a range of additional cognitive and behavior dysfunction (Frith, 1999; Galaburda, 1999), such as the positive symptoms of psychosis proneness (Richardson, 1994) and working memory (Plaza and Guitton, 1997) and attention (Duncan et al., 1994; Hari and Renvall, 2001) deficits.”

“…studies conducted on children with dyslexia and specific language impairment have also shown difficulty in discrimination of rapidly presented short duration sounds (Hari & Renvall, 2001; Martino, Espesser, Rey, & Habib, 2001; Reed, 1989; Tallal, Miller, & Fitch, 1993; Wright et al., 1997).”

“Because dyslexia associates with various auditory disorders (Hari and Renvall, 2001) and because animal studies suggest minimal anatomical abnormalities in individuals with non-total ROBO1 defect, we applied a sensitive electrophysiological biomarker of functional crossing in auditory pathways.”

“example, dyslexic children and adults are impaired in their ability to recognize and sequence the elements of rapidly successive speech and non-speech stimuli (Farmer and Klein, 1995; Ahissar et al., 2000; Stein and Walsh, 1997; Hari and Renvall, 2001).”

“Furthermore, as longer stimulus integration times were reported in dyslexic than fluent readers (Hairston et al., 2005; Hari and Kiesilä, 1996; Hari and Renvall, 2001; Merzenich et al., 1993), we expected to find distinct effects of the stimulus-timing conditions on the two groups.”

“…have suggested that dyslexia could be caused by deficits or differences in visual attention processes (e.g., Bosse, Tainturier, & Valdois, 2007; Facoetti, Lorusso, Cattaneo, Galli, & Molteni, 2005; Facoetti et al., 2010; Hari & Renvall, 2001; Hari et al., 2001; Valdois, Bosse, & Tainturier, 2004).”

“Our hypothesis is that if individuals with SLI require more time to engage attention, then it is less likely they will be able to accurately process a rapid sequence of linguistic stimuli (see Hari and Renvall, 2001).”

“…to a magnocellular deficit (Borsting et al., 1996; Witton et al., 1998; Cestnick and Coltheart, 1999), to temporal attention deficits (Hari and Renvall, 2001; Lallier and Valdois, 2012) or to spatial attention (Facoetti et al., 2006, 2010) – typically co-occur with the phonemic awareness…”

“Deficits in visual attention orienting and visual attention shifting are well documented but they extend to the auditory modality and were found to more specifically relate with the phonological deficit (Facoetti et al., 2010; Hari & Renvall, 2001; Lallier et al., 2013).”

“A deficit in dyslexic children’s rapid serial stimuli processing was found to be amodal, involving auditory and visual modalities (Facoetti et al., 2005; Hari et al., 1999; Hari & Renvall, 2001; Lallier et al., 2010).”

“A similar perspective (Hari and Renvall, 2001; Facoetti, et al., 2006, 2008), derived primarily from observations of a prolonged attentional blink and slower spatial cued-detection in dyslexia, hypothesises that sluggish automatic engaging and disengaging of attention impairs the visual selection…”

“…not to focus visual attention as much as normal readers do (Facoetti, Paganoni, & Lorusso, 2000; Facoetti, Paganoni, Turatto, Marzola, & Mascetti, 2000), and a general attentional deficit across visual and auditory modalities, related to “sluggish attentional shifts” (Hari & Renvall, 2001).”

“in auditory processing may be associated with reading impairment (Hari and Kiesila, 1996; Hari and Renvall, 2001).”

“…Burdick, et al., 2009; Calhoun & Mayes, 2005; Castaneda, TuulioHenriksson, Marttunen, Suvisaari, & Lonnqvist, 2008; Escalante-Mead, et al., 2003; Hari & Renvall, 2001; Leung, Lee, Yip, Li, & Wong, 2009; Micco, et al., 2009; Mur, Portella, Martinez-Aran, Pifarre, & Vieta, 2007; Simonsen, et al.,…”

“Contrastively, the sequential dimension of visual perceptual attention has been proposed as a significant contributor to dyslexia associated with phonological difficulties (sluggish attentional shifting theory of dyslexia, Hari and Renvall, 2001).”

“First, the sluggish attentional shifting theory (Hari & Renvall, 2001) posits that dyslexia results from problems in disengaging attention automatically from the attended segments of speech or orthographic sequences, impeding the formation of both phonological and orthographic representations.”

“In addition, Hari and Revall (2001) proposed that the observed deficits may be the result of children with dyslexia having sluggish attentional shift, which can impair rapid stimulus sequence processing regardless of the modality. However, Bosse, Tanturier, and Valdois (2007) have recently suggested that the visual at…”

“…and inattention show some relation to RAN or are impaired in populations that show poor RAN performance (Waber, Wolff, Forbes & Weiler, 2000; Hari & Renvall, 2001; Pham, Fine, & Semrud-Clikeman, 2011) suggesting that RAN tasks provide a measure of executive control (Denckla & Cutting, 2001).”

“…and auditory attention (Buchholz & McKone, 2004; Casco & Prunetti, 1996; Dufor et al., 2007; Facoetti et al., 2000; Valdois et al., 2004), shifting (Hari & Renvall, 2001; Laasonen et al., 2012), verbal categorical and phonological fluency, verbal and visual short-term memory, verbal and…”

“E-mail: gianmarco.marzocchi@unimib.it of the transient component (magnocellular) of the visual system specialized in the rapid temporal information processing (Facoetti, Lorusso, Cattaneo, Galli, & Molteni, 2005; Facoetti et al., 2003; Facoetti, Paganoni, & Lorusso, 2000; Hari & Renvall, 2001).”

“…is also more than one theory available (Vidyasagar & Pammer, 2010), including the magnocellular theory (Stein & Walsh, 1997), the sluggish attentional shifting theory (Gori & Facoetti, 2015; Hari & Renvall, 2001), visual stress theory (Wilkins et al., 2004), and the VAS theory (Bosse et al., 2007).”

“Indeed, attentional deficits were also reported in dyslexic children (e.g., Hari and Renvall, 2001; Facoetti et al., 2010) and might contribute to the abnormal eye movement pattern shown in reading (see also Hawelka et al., 2010 for a link between word reading and eye movement control).”

“They might also be accounted for by general theories of temporal or fast sequential processing deficits in dyslexia (Farmer and Klein, 1995; Hari and Renvall, 2001; Tallal, 1980).”

“Furthermore, related research suggests that some effective language or reading interventions might work in part by training selective attention (Gillam, 1999; Gillam, Crofford, Gale, & Hoffman, 2001; Gillam, Loeb, & Friel-Patti, 2001; Hari & Renvall, 2001; Sundberg & Lacerda, 2003).”

“Our data are consistent with an alternative view that dyslexics’ perceptual deficits relate to attentional processes, rather than being low-level temporal or language-specific [1,7,15,44].”

“…in the dorsal stream, while ventral stream function remains intact (e.g. Livingstone, Rosen, Drislane & Galaburda, 1991; Lovegrove, 1996; Stein, 2003; see Olson & Datta, 2002, for a discussion of the role of IQ and Hari & Renvall, 2001, for a discussion of the role of attention in some findings).”

“Other authors have investigated deficits in underlying sensory mechanisms as potentially causing DD (Hari & Renvall 2001).”

“For example, Hari and Renvall (2001) suggested that a parietal (attentional) amodal dysfunction could be responsible for temporal deficits reported in developmental dyslexia.”

“To minimize difficulties with SAS, we use relatively long stimulus presentations (200-ms presentation with 300ms interstimulus interval, ISI, in the sequential condition).”

“Hari and Renvall (2001) as well as Hari, Renvall, and Tanskanen (2001) proposed that a combination of mild left inattention (also called “left minineglect”) and sluggish attentional capture on both sides could explain dyslexics’ diYculties in reading and also in rapid temporal processing.”

“…to phonology (Frith, 1999; Snowling, 2001; Ramus et al., 2003), (ii) a disorder of the magnocellular pathways (Galaburda, 1993; Eden et al., 1996b; Hari and Renvall, 2001; Stein, 2001), (iii) dysfunction of the visuospatial attention system1 (Facoetti et al., 2000; Facoetti et al., 2006; Peyrin…”

“…2004), attentional (Bosse et al., 2007; Buchholz and Davies, 2005; Dubois et al., 2010; Facoetti and Molteni, 2001; Facoetti et al., 2001, 2003; Hari and Renvall, 2001; Pammer et al., 2004; Peyrin et al., 2008, 2011; Valdois et al., 2003, 2009), visual-magnocellular (Livingstone et al., 1991;…”

“…account, Tallal, 1980; noisy-system theory, Sperling, Lu, Manis, & Seidenberg, 2005), to domain-general attentional (e.g. sluggish attention, Hari & Renvall, 2001; spatial attention, Franceschini, Gori, Ruffino, Pedrolli, & Facoetti, 2012; attention span, Bosse, Tainturier, & Valdois, 2007)…”

“Recent ERP data of Wimmer et al.(2002) are in accordance with the Hari and Renvall(2001) model.”

“This evidence comes from the reported deviations in dyslexic’s performance on the attentional blink paradigm [7,8,12,14].”

“…Grard, Vanault, & Dugas, 1995; Vidyasagar & Pammer, 1999; Visser, Boden, & Giaschi, 2004; Williams, Brannan, & Lartigue, 1987; Hari et al., 1999; Hari & Renvall, 2001; see for reviews see Boden & Giaschi, 2007; Franceschini et al., 2015, 2016; Gori & Facoetti, 2014, 2015; Gori, Molteni, et al.,…”

“Longer attentional dwell time or elevated backward masking? The difficulty experienced by D-excellent individuals when required to identify and compare two tones separated by short ISIs, resembled previous reports of abnormal auditory and visual performance in dyslexia with short ISIs [9].”

“The left-sided deficits of visual processing that have been observed in dyslexic subjects (Stein & Walsh, 1997; Hari & Renvall, 2001; Hari, Renvall, & Tanskanen, 2001; Hari & Koivikko, 1999; Sireteanu, Goertz, Bachert, & Wandert, 2005) and in children with attention”