Attentional changes during discrimination learning by retarded children.
Kids with ID may look at the wrong cue right after a rule change even when they eventually pick the right picture, so fade prompts on the new dimension and check eye orientation first.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team watched how kids with intellectual disability looked at pictures during a two-choice game.
Each trial showed two shapes. The child had to press the correct one to earn a token.
A small light sat above each picture. Pressing the light counted as an "observing response" and let the researchers see where the child looked.
After the kids learned one rule, the rule changed. This is called an extradimensional shift. The researchers then tracked how looking patterns changed.
What they found
Right after the shift, kids started pressing the light above the now-wrong picture.
They paid more attention to the feature that no longer mattered.
This jump in "wrong" looking challenges simple two-process theories that say attention should follow reward.
How this fits with other research
Older lab work by Fantino (1968) and Schneider et al. (1967) already showed that fading beats trial-and-error for kids with ID.
Singh et al. (1978) add a new lens: even with fading, attention can still drift to the wrong cue after a rule change.
Mulder et al. (2020) later pooled 28 studies and confirmed fading works, yet they never measured where kids actually looked.
The 1978 data fill that gap and warn us that success on the outside can hide attention mistakes on the inside.
Why it matters
When you switch the relevant feature during discrimination training, plan extra prompt-fading steps.
Watch for brief returns to old cues, not just correct responses.
Add quick probes that force the learner to look at the new key feature before emitting the response.
This small check can stop errors before they snowball and save you from having to retrain the whole task.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Before the first post-shift trial, prompt the learner to orient to the newly relevant feature (color, shape, or position) and require an observing response toward it before allowing the choice.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Eight moderately retarded children were trained on a simultaneous two-choice discrimination problem and a series of discrimination-shift problems. The procedure required the subjects to perform overt observing responses to produce elements of the discriminative stimuli, making it possible to measure directly changes in attention to different aspects of stimuli during learning. The patterns of change in observing responses were generally in line with descriptions of attentional changes derived from two-process theories of discrimination learning; for example, the frequency of irrelevant observing responses was high during the presolution period during extradimensional shifts but was low during intradimensional shifts. Contrary to current theories, extradimensional shifts caused an immediate increase in irrelevant observing responses, and intradimensional shifts usually caused an increase in relevant observing responses. Subjects responded to later shift problems by initially increasing both relevant and irrelevant observing responses, then withholding irrelevant observing responses.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1978 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1978.29-527