Visual localization in dyslexia

Individuals with specific reading disability (SRD) may exhibit visual psychophysical abnormalities that include prolonged visual persistence, decreased luminance contrast sensitivity, lower flicker fusion thresholds, abnormal metacontrast masking, and lower motion detection sensitivity. These abnormalities could result from impairment of the magnocellular division of the visual afferent pathway to the cortex. The authors predicted that an impairment of this pathway would also cause abnormalities in ability to localize visual stimuli. This prediction was tested in 2 experiments. Results of both experiments showed that adults who reported a history of SRD and who currently had lower reading performance were less able than non-SRD participants to report the locations of small visual stimuli that were briefly flashed at positions similar to the ends of lines of text.