Attention, motivation, and reading coherence failure: a neuropsychological perspective

Reading coherence, defined as the ability to create appropriate, meaningful connections between the elements within a specific text itself and between elements within a text and the reader's prior knowledge, is one of the key processes involved in reading comprehension. This article describes reading coherence within the context of a neuropsychological model combining recent research in motivation, attention, and working memory. Specifically, a unique neuropsychologically identifiable form of reading coherence failure arising from the attentional and motivational deficiencies, based in altered frontoventral striatal reward circuits associated with noradrenaline (NA) circuitry, consistent with the delay-aversion model (dual-pathway model) of Sonuga-Barke ( 2003 ) is postulated. This article provides a model for this subset of reading disorders of which etiology is based on the executive support processes for reading and not in the mechanics of actual reading such as decoding and phonetics.