Mechanisms underlying reading avoidance in children with reading difficulties.

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PROJECT SUMMARY This AREA grant will explore information processing (IP) mechanisms underlying reading avoidance in youth with a specific learning disorder in reading (RD). For children with RD, weaknesses in a specific academic skill (word decoding) can impact many domains over time, including educational and occupational attainment and mental health. A major contributing factor to these impairments is reduced reading practice which limits educational access causing a cascade of negative outcomes. Interrupting this cascade requires interventions that address the fact that many children with RD avoid reading even after they have acquired the necessary decoding skills from effective reading interventions. This grant aims to identify mechanisms underlying reading avoidance in children with RD. Avoidance and its underlying mechanisms have been well-characterized in mental health, particularly in anxiety. In these models, three information-processing (IP) biases to threat drive avoidance and subsequent anxiety: attention bias, associative learning, and automatic action tendencies. These IP biases could be related to reading avoidance and subsequent reading anxiety: reading-related stimuli may evoke initial hypervigilance followed by disengagement (attention bias, Aim 1a), learned fearful responses (associative learning, Aim 1b), and distancing actions (automatic action tendencies, Aim 1c) in youth with RD. While these relationships are confirmed for anxiety, they have yet to be tested in RD (Aim 2). In this proposal, we aim to test whether children with RD exhibit reading-related IP biases that contribute to reading avoidance and reading anxiety. We will recruit children ages 10-12 with RD (N=60) and without RD (N=60). Participants will complete experimental tasks assessing IP biases (attention bias, associative learning, automatic action tendencies), self- and parent-report measures of reading avoidance and reading anxiety, and standardized reading assessments. If successful, this work could represent a significant step forward in understanding mechanisms underlying reading avoidance, and inform interventions to target IP biases that could augment and improve long-term effects of existing reading interventions. This project has high and immediate translational potential, and aligns closely with NICHD’s Child Development and Behavior branch’s research priority: “Use of neurocognitive risk/protective factors to inform targeted treatment strategies”. The research team exemplifies an interdisciplinary collaborative approach that bridges across the learning disabilities and child mental health fields which have traditionally remained quite separate. Central to AREA goals, undergraduate students will be integral members of the research team, receiving intensive training in clinical research and collaborative team science skills.