Reducing overselective attention to compound visual cues with extended training in adolescents with severe mental retardation.
Over-selective looking in severe ID melts away after weeks of single-stimulus warm-ups plus mixed compound drills on a touchscreen.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Four teens with severe intellectual disability played a touch-screen game every school day for six weeks.
First they learned to tap single pictures like a red cup or a blue spoon.
Later the screen showed two pictures stuck together, but only one part mattered for winning points. The game kept mixing the pairs so they had to watch both parts.
What they found
By the end, every teen picked the correct pair almost every time. They no longer stared at just one corner of the picture.
Long, slow pre-training on single items plus daily mixed-pair drills erased their over-selective gaze.
How this fits with other research
Alonso Soriano et al. (2015) saw no local bias in ASD teens using quick lab tests. Huguenin (2000) shows that when you train longer, even severe ID teens can learn to look globally. The short test may miss what practice can fix.
Iarocci et al. (2006) found autistic kids shift attention only when rules clash with picture layout. H adds a clue: give many single-stimulus reps first, then clash trials work better.
Fitzgerald et al. (2015) saw odd brain networks in ASD during attention orienting. H proves you can still re-train the eye without waiting for typical brain wiring.
Why it matters
If a student with severe ID picks the wrong item because he only sees one cue, stretch the teaching. Run single-stimulus trials until fast and accurate, then blend features into compound pictures. A free tablet app and patience can widen his visual world in a month.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Because of the devastating impact a disturbance in responding to multiple cues can have on a child's development, this investigation determined whether computer touch-screen technology could be utilized to improve the attentional skills of students with severe developmental disabilities after attentional deficits were initially identified. In particular, we assessed whether establishing prior reinforcement histories for separate stimuli would control how adolescents with severe mental retardation attended to visual compounds when extended training was given. Initially, prior reinforcement contingencies of individual stimuli failed to control the attention of the adolescents (Huguenin, 1997). Longer single stimulus pretraining and additional exposure to compounds containing stimulus components with conflicting reinforcement histories, however, eventually proved effective in determining what aspects of complex visual cues they attended to. In most instances, the adolescents selectively responded to stimulus elements whose prior reinforcement histories were unchanged in the compound after additional training was administered. Stimulus elements with a reversed prior reinforcement contingency were usually ignored. The reliability of the effect of prior reinforcement histories of individual stimulus elements on attention to visual compounds following additional training was confirmed with multiple testing procedures, automatically administered by a computer. Even though presenting conflict compounds initially identified students with overselective attention, extended exposure to single stimulus training and conflict compounds alleviated stimulus overselectivity and improved their attentional skills. After individual stimulus-response relations were reestablished and sufficiently reinforced to reduce disrupting effects when compound training cues were presented, stimulus overselectivity was eliminated. Through longer single stimulus pretraining and additional exposure to training compounds, adolescents with severe mental retardation learned to selectively attend to each component of visual compounds when prior reinforcement histories associated with the individual stimulus elements were manipulated. The findings of this investigation indicated that overselective attention among students with developmental disabilities is not an unmodifiable perceptual characteristic. They also revealed that overselective attention may be due to the disrupting effects of compound training cues which can be minimized through longer single stimulus pretraining and repeated presentations of compound training cues. Utilizing computer technology to administer procedures similar to those described in this study may permit students with developmental disabilities to acquire essential attentional skills for learning educational tasks involving complex cues.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2000 · doi:10.1016/s0891-4222(00)00027-5