ABSTRACT
Children diagnosed as mildly mentally retarded were examined with respect to performance on Estes's (1965) span-of-apprehension task. Based on their scores on the Simplified Version of the Intellectual Achievement Responsibility scale, we divided subjects into a "learned-helpless" group and a "mastery-oriented" group. Motivational orientation had a significant effect on performance, with the mastery-oriented subjects demonstrating higher detection accuracies than the learned-helpless subjects. These results have implications regarding not only centrally mediated attentional functioning in children with mental retardation, but also interpretation of certain previous findings with the span-of-apprehension task.
Subject(s)
Attention , Helplessness, Learned , Intellectual Disability/psychology , Motivation , Child , Education of Intellectually Disabled , Female , Humans , Internal-External Control , Male , Pattern Recognition, VisualABSTRACT
The present investigation is the first to apply Estes' (1965) span of apprehension task to the study of attentional functioning in mentally retarded persons. Detection accuracies of 25 children diagnosed as mildly mentally retarded and 25 non-retarded children were compared under conditions of 100-ms exposure duration, and either two, four, six or eight distractor letters. Significant main effects of subject group and distractor number were found, with no interaction. These results provide converging evidence in support of previous positions that posit a structural deficit in mentally retarded individuals with respect to centrally mediated processing.
