Latencies of stimulus-driven eye movements are shorter in dyslexic subjects.

Eye movements latencies toward peripherally presented stimuli were measured in 10-year-old dyslexic and control children. Dyslexic subjects, previously found to be oversensitive to stimulation of the magnocellular channel, showed reduced latencies as compared to normally reading controls. An attention shifting task was also used which showed no group differences in latencies of eye movements.

Attentional deficit in dyslexia: a general or specific impairment?

Dyslexic and control children were tested in a visuomotor attentional task, which provides independent measures of the alerting, orienting and conflict components of the attentional system. Our results show that dyslexics are impaired with respect to controls in the attentional conflict component (resolution of conflict of incongruent peripheral information), while the alerting and orienting components remain preserved. It excludes an overall attentional impairment and points to more specific attentional processing difficulty i.

Luminance and chromatic contrast sensitivity in dyslexia: the magnocellular deficit hypothesis revisited.

The hypothesis of a magnocellular channel deficit in dyslexia was tested. Subjects were 10-year-old dyslexics and normal readers. Psychophysical thresholds for luminance and chromatic contrasts were estimated using black and white and red and green sinusoidal gratings of various spatial frequencies, presented in static and dynamic conditions (drift and reversal).