Object Discrimination is an Independent Predictor of Children’s Reading Ability

Reading is a fundamental everyday skill, yet not everyone easily acquires it. For decades, research focused on the role of phonological processing in reading difficulties while the visual component of reading was left behind. The high-level visual dysfunction hypothesis suggests that reading problems experienced by some individuals can indicate a broader impairment in visual cognition. In this preregistered study, we investigated whether object discrimination abilities, measured with a visual foraging task, predict concurrent reading performance in early readers. Participants included 1st and 3rd graders (approximate ages 6 and 8 years, respectively, total N = 163) assessed using standardized reading performance tests, phonological processing measures, rapid automatized naming of colors, a scale of ADHD-related symptoms, and a foraging paradigm involving object discrimination.In the foraging task, children selected matching objects from a display containing a central target exemplar, nine matching targets, and nine distractors. Trials varied by condition: basic-level (targets and distractors from different categories), subordinate-level (from the same category), and control (black and white circles). Object discrimination was operationalized as the number of targets participants correctly identified per second. Lower- and higher-level visual similarity of objects was assessed via activation patterns of the CORnet-S neural network. Semantic similarities of the stimuli were obtained through separate human ratings.The findings indicate that object discrimination significantly predicts reading performance, even after controlling for age, phonological processing, behaviors related to inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity, rapid automatized naming, and foraging speed during control trials. Additionally, we found that better reading skills are associated with more effective use of semantic and higher-level visual information during object discrimination. In contrast, lower-level visual information did not show a similar pattern.These results support the high-level visual dysfunction hypothesis of dyslexia and highlight the importance of visual object processing in reading — a factor that has for a long time been largely ignored in studies on reading difficulties.