Sustained Attention and Reading Retardation

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Abstract
This study was designed to assess the ability to sustain visual attention and its relationship to reading retardation. Vigilance performance of twenty fourth-grade retarded readers was compared with that of twenty normal readers matched for age, sex, grade, and intelligence. It was hypothesized that the retarded readers would perform more poorly on detection of visual stimuli and that they would exhibit a faster rate of performance decrement. Results revealed that retarded readers did make significantly more errors in detection. While both groups demonstrated a decrease in correct stimulus detection over time, no significant difference in rate of performance decrement was revealed between groups.