Stimulus overselectivity in learning disabled children.
Check for stimulus overselectivity in kids with LD or ID before you teach new discriminations.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Wing (1981) watched first-graders pick matching pictures. Some kids had learning disabilities. Some had mild intellectual disability. Some had no diagnosis.
Each trial showed three pictures. Only one picture matched a sample. Kids had to touch the match. The team noted which cues each child used.
What they found
About half of the LD kids picked the match using just one cue. They ignored color, shape, or size that also mattered. This is called stimulus overselectivity.
Young kids with mild ID showed the same narrow focus. Older kids with mild ID and non-handicapped kids used many cues. LD children acted like younger kids.
How this fits with other research
Eisenhower et al. (2006) later saw the same pattern in older residential students with ID. They added that higher autism scores went hand in hand with narrower focus.
Vassos et al. (2016) found no difference between autism, Down syndrome, and typical kids when mental age was the same. The 1981 LD data fit right into this line.
Cox et al. (2015) counted only 19 % of kids with ASD showing overselectivity today. Better early teaching may explain the drop since 1981.
Farmer-Dougan et al. (1999) showed you can fix the problem. They taught kids to point to each part before picking. Overselectivity vanished while the prompt stayed in place.
Why it matters
Before you run a discrimination program, test whether your learner sees all the cues. Use a quick matching-to-sample probe. If the child picks using only one feature, add differential observing prompts like Farmer-Dougan et al. (1999). Have the child touch or name each element before the final choice. This simple step can save weeks of trial-and-error teaching.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Stimulus overselectivity, a phenomenon exhibited by autistic and institutionalized retarded individuals, was examined in mildly handicapped and nonhandicapped public school children. Subjects were 16 young, educable mentally retarded, 16 learning disabled, 15 nonhandicapped first- and second-graders, and 16 older, educable retarded students. The children were trained on a 3-component visual discrimination task and then tested on individual elements to determine which element or elements were controlling subject responses. Nine of the young educable mentally retarded children and eight of the learning disabled students showed some overselectivity. The majority of overselective retarded children were controlled by only one of the three components of the training cue, whereas the majority of the overselective learning disabled children responded to the discrimination task on the basis of two of the three components. No overselectivity was exhibited by the nonhandicapped students. All three cue components were also functional in controlling the responding of 14 of the 16 older retarded students, but two children were under the control of only one cue. The research indicated that in terms of overselectivity, learning disabled children respond more like young, mildly retarded children than they do like nonhandicapped ones. The demonstration of stimulus overselectivity in a sizable portion of a learning disabled sample may have implications for a more empirically based approach to this handicapped population.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1981 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1981.14-239