Declarative and procedural learning in children and adolescents with posterior fossa tumours.

Background: This quasi-experimental study was designed to assess two important learning types - procedural and declarative--in children and adolescents affected by posterior fossa tumours (astrocytoma vs. medulloblastoma), given that memory has an important impact on the child's academic achievement and personal development.

Methods: We had three groups: two clinical (eighteen subjects) and one control (twelve subjects).

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.