Assessing visual attention in young children and adolescents with severe mental retardation utilizing conditional-discrimination tasks and multiple testing procedures.
Touch-screen conditional-discrimination tasks show that kids with severe ID can learn to attend to multiple cues if given enough pretraining.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers tested how kids pay attention to pictures on a touch screen. They worked with two groups: toddlers without disabilities and teens with severe intellectual disability.
Each child had to pick the correct picture when two cues were shown together. The task forced them to watch both parts of the picture at once.
What they found
Both groups learned the game. The teens with ID needed more warm-up trials first. Once they got the extra practice, they stopped focusing on only one cue.
The study shows that overselective attention is not fixed. Kids with severe ID can learn to look at more than one thing if you give them enough pretraining.
How this fits with other research
Huguenin (2000) ran the same touch-screen task with only teens. That study proved that long pretraining plus repeated compound trials can wipe out overselectivity. The 2004 paper keeps the same method and adds toddlers, showing the task works across ages.
Ploog et al. (2007) tested kids with autism using touch cues instead of pictures. They also found overselectivity, but only when they ran a second probe test. Both papers warn that one test can hide the true attention pattern.
Hochhauser et al. (2018) looked at adolescents with ASD using a change-blindness task. Those teens spotted picture changes faster than typical peers. That result seems opposite to the ID teens who needed extra help, but the tasks differ: change detection is quick and automatic, while conditional discrimination needs slow rule learning.
Why it matters
If you assess a child who seems stuck on one cue, add more single-stimulus warm-ups before you test. Run the full task again the next day; the extra reps often fix the tunnel vision. This cheap tweak can save you from labeling a kid as “overselective” when they just need more teaching.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
To effectively reduce overselective attention, a fine-grained analysis of the control exhibited by compound training cues is first needed. Computer software was developed in this study to administer two different stimulus control-testing procedures to assess how three young children of normal development and three adolescents with severe mental retardation attended to stimulus compounds when conditional-discrimination tasks were provided. One test assessed stimulus control by determining response accuracy for each component of the S+ compounds. The other testing procedure measured the response topographies of the compound stimuli using a touch screen attached to a computer monitor screen. After pretraining each stimulus component, all three children attended simultaneously to two elements in a conditional-discrimination task with few errors occurring. The adolescents with mental retardation eventually attended to both elements simultaneously but required more pretraining and exposure to the conditional-discrimination tasks before simultaneous attention occurred. Since the adolescents with severe mental retardation learned to simultaneously attend to multiple cues in the conditional-discrimination tasks, this demonstrated that restricted attention is not an unmodifiable perceptual characteristic among individuals with developmental disabilities. Recording response topographies with a touch screen was also discovered to be a sensitive measure of stimulus preferences for both groups. Utilizing touch-screen technology may prove to be critical for accurately identifying stimulus preferences and contribute to the understanding and treatment of overselective attention in students with attentional deficits.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2004 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2004.01.001