Talk title: Workplace cognition in adults with dyslexia

Abstract

Cognitive difficulties that extend beyond reading and spelling are well documented in dyslexia. Moreover, they persist into adulthood, even when literacy-related skills have been remediated. Two such affected areas with important implications for successful everyday functioning are executive function and prospective memory (or memory for delayed intentions). While the impact of dyslexia-related deficits in executive function on adult education has received some study, the effects of broader cognitive problems on workplace performance is underexplored, despite the clear need for prioritisation, planning, and multitasking in employment settings. The research to be presented in this seminar represents an initial step in exploring this issue, assessing optimal cognitive performance in the workplace via a computer-based non-immersive virtual reality office environment. The JEF® (Jansari et al., 2014) is a designed to measure executive function and prospective memory abilities in an ecologically valid way. Participants are asked to imagine that it was their first day in an office job and that they had been set the task of setting up a room for a meeting, being given certain tasks to complete and being instructed to comply with certain constraints. The performance of adults with and without dyslexia (matched for age and short-form IQ but differing in reading and spelling abilities) was compared on the JEF®. The group with dyslexia showed deficits in overall JEF® performance, as well as on some, but not all, finer-grained measures of executive function and prospective memory. The results highlight areas of office-based cognition in which targeted support might be needed for employees with dyslexia, but also highlight abilities where no differences were found and which might be potentially harnessed to overcome weaknesses.  An overview of research currently underway to extend this initial study and which explores both optimal and typical cognitive performance in office environments will then be considered.