Although visual-attentional skills may have a causal role in the development of reading skills, developmental reading difficulties (developmental dyslexia) have historically been primarily linked to auditory-phonological abnormalities. The orthographic processing of the letter string and the graphemic parsing that come before the grapheme-to-phoneme mapping may include visuo-attentional mechanisms. Here, we measured visuospatial attention in a sizable sample of primary school children (n=398) using a straightforward paper and pencil activity made up of three labyrinths. Our labyrinth task, which also controls for sensorimotor learning, primarily evaluates dispersed and focused visuospatial attention in contrast to visual search tasks that require visual working memory. Children with reading difficulties (n=58) displayed obvious visuospatial attention deficits compared to regular readers (n=340), which did not appear to be related to the motor coordination and procedural learning abilities required for this paper and pencil exercise. An effective reading rehabilitation programme should incorporate both auditory-phonological and visuo-attentional therapies, as visual attention is defective in roughly 40% of children with reading difficulties.
