Neural underpinnings of dyslexia as a disorder of visuo-spatial attention

For nearly 100 years, the underlying cause of dyslexia has been a matter of much debate, with widely varying viewpoints that have ranged from considering dyslexia as largely a learning disability to claims that it is essentially a perceptual defect occurring early along the visual pathway. This paper reviews some of this literature with particular reference to the studies that have implicated a defect in the afferent visual pathways in the aetiology of the disorder, then goes on to outline a neural theory of how functionally distinct parallel pathways in vision interact with each other in the process of reading and suggests how a defect in these pathways can lead to reading difficulties. Central to the proposed scheme is the suggestion that a fast-track pathway, arising from the magnocellular cells in the retina and acting through an attentional mechanism, has a gating function in spotlighting the individual letters of a text in a sequential fashion. That such gating occurs at the level of the primary visual cortex is supported by recent physiological evidence concerning attentional mechanisms.