Allocation of attention and effect of practice on persons with and without mental retardation.
Attention allocation works fine in mild–moderate ID when tasks load different memory stores, so rethink task design before adding more practice.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Oka et al. (2008) watched adults with mild–moderate intellectual disability do two tasks at once.
One task used the eyes, the other used the ears, so the memory loads did not clash.
The team also gave extra practice to see if it would help anyone work faster or more accurately.
What they found
The ID group split their attention between sight and sound just like typically developing peers.
Extra practice did not boost speed or accuracy for either group.
In this set-up, intellectual disability did not hurt dual-task focus and repetition did not help.
How this fits with other research
Stancliffe et al. (2007) and Xenitidis et al. (2010) found weaker phonological working memory in the same population.
Those studies used tasks that tapped the same memory store twice, creating a bottleneck.
Kohei’s team removed the bottleneck by using separate stores, showing attention is intact when tasks do not compete.
Doughty et al. (2002) adds that familiar, meaningful material can also hide working-memory gaps, another clue that task design, not ability alone, drives the score.
Why it matters
When you plan skill training or job tasks, keep the memory loads in separate channels.
Pair a hands-on step with a spoken cue instead of two spoken cues.
This small tweak lets learners with ID show steady attention without extra drill sessions.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Persons with mild and moderate mental retardation and CA-matched persons without mental retardation performed a dual-task, "pencil-and-paper task" (Baddeley, Della Sala, Gray, Papagno, & Spinnler (1997). Testing central executive functioning with a pencil-and-paper test. In Rabbit (Ed.), Methodology of Frontal and Executive Function (pp. 61-80). Hove, East Sussex, UK: Psychology Press), which includes a memory span task and a tracking task. The memory span task loads onto phonological working memory and the tracking task loads onto visuo-spatial working memory. By comparing performance between single and dual-task, we assessed the characteristics of executive function, which allocates attentional resources between two tasks. Results indicate that there was no difference in the characteristics between the two groups, and there was no improvement in the characteristics with practice. Thus, we suggest that when persons with mental retardation perform a dual-task that have no interference in the sub-storage of working memory, their function of attentional allocation can work without impairment.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2008 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2007.02.004