Evaluating Willingness to Pay as a Measure of the Impact of Dyslexia in Adults

International audienceWhile much is known about dyslexia in school-age children and adolescents, less is known about its effects on quality of life in adults. Using data from the Connecticut Longitudinal Study, we provide the first estimates of the monetary value of improving reading, speaking, and cognitive skills to dyslexic and nondyslexic adults. Using a stated-preference survey, we find that dyslexic and nondyslexic individuals value improvements in their skills in reading speed, reading aloud, pronunciation, memory, and information retrieval at about the same rate. Because dyslexics have lower self-reported levels on these skills, their total willingness to pay to achieve a high level of skill is substantially greater than for nondyslexics. However, dyslexic individuals’ willingness to pay (averaging $3000 for an improvement in all skills simultaneously) is small compared with the difference in earnings between dyslexic and nondyslexic adults. We estimate that dyslexic individuals earn 15$8000) than nondyslexic individuals. Although improvements in reading, speaking, and cognitive skills in adulthood are unlikely to eliminate the earnings difference that reflects differences in educational attainment and other factors, stated-preference estimates of the value of cognitive skills may substantially underestimate the value derived from effects on lifetime earnings and health

Auditory Selective Attention: An fMRI Investigation

of the thorniest problems faced by cognitive scientists (Allport, 1989; Kahneman, 1973; Posner and Boies, 1971; Schneider and Shiffrin, 1977; Wickens, 1980). When considering attention at the cognitive level, we must consider the following functional issues. First, an individual operating in an environment is bombarded by a vast array of perceptual inputs simultaneously and must, in order to function effectively, somehow select certain things for enhanced processing while ignoring others (Allport, 1989; Posner, 1991). (Selective attention may, of course, be further subdivided into operations such as disengagement from a current focus, engagement of a new focus, and sustained focal attention over time (Posner and Peterson, 1990; Posner, 1991).) Second, there appear to be limits on the number of things that can be processed simultaneously; that is, a bottleneck or capacity limitation exists on the ability to divide attention between multiple stimuli or mental events. Much early laborat