Role of Visual Attention in Developmental Dyslexia

Attention is a neurocognitive process composed by subprocesses located in several brain areas and controlled by specific neurotransmitters (Petersen & Posner, 2012). This process aims to select relevant information and modulates sensory processing, perception, memory, and learning. This selection of information processing – based on the combination of perceptual noise exclusion and signal enhancement – is fundamental in developing fine object representations in the brain (see Corbetta & Shulman, 2011; Petersen & Posner, 2012; Roelfsema, van Ooyen, & Watanabe, 2010, for reviews). Alerting and orienting are the two main processes involved in reading acquisition. Alerting is defined as the multisensory attentional process that increases performance during tasks (Petersen & Posner, 2012), producing a phasic change in alertness (e.g., Ronconi et al., 2016). The alerting system can already be measured in the infant brain (e.g., Ronconi, Facoetti et al., 2014).