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The impact of developmental dyslexia on workplace cognition: Evidence from a virtual reality environment

Published: 04 October 2022 Publication History

Abstract

The cognitive difficulties associated with dyslexia persist into adulthood but insights into their impact in employment settings are lacking. A virtual office environment was used to assess two areas of cognition frequently called upon in the workplace, executive function and prospective memory. Eight adults with dyslexia and 27 adults without dyslexia were tested on a virtual office task. They read a scenario describing their new role in an office and were given tasks to complete. The group with dyslexia performed worse overall. On the individual performance measures, the group with dyslexia scored lower on the selective-thinking and planning measures of executive function and also performed worse on two of the three prospective memory measures, namely event-based and time-based prospective memory. The findings indicate how dyslexia can affect workplace cognition, identifying areas in which support might be needed and highlighting areas of relative strength which might be harnessed.

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    ECCE '22: Proceedings of the 33rd European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics
    October 2022
    183 pages
    ISBN:9781450398084
    DOI:10.1145/3552327
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 04 October 2022

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    Author Tags

    1. Developmental Dyslexia
    2. Executive function, Prospective memory, Virtual reality, Workplace cognition

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    ECCE 2022
    ECCE 2022: 33rd European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics
    October 4 - 7, 2022
    Kaiserslautern, Germany

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