Selective Attention, Reflection-Impulsivity and the Learning Disabled Child.

Recent research concerning the learning disabled child has indicated that attentional deficits and poor impulse control impair the learning process. The learning disabled child, experiencing developmental delays in his ability to sustain attention, may still be over inclusively attending to more aspects of the stimulus than is necessary. As a consequence, when expected to put forth an answer, the learning disabled child may respond impulsively. He may spew forth the first reasonable hypothesis that comes to mind, without thinking about its probable validity. The non-learning disabled child, on the other hand, has progressed to the phase of selective attention. He is able to focus on the distinctive features of the stimulus. His responding, therefore, is more reflective, i.e., he considers the differential validity of several hypothesis before answering.This study has been carried out to compare the learning disabled child’s performance on an auditory selective attention task to the performance of the non-learning disabled or normal child. By dividing the group of learning disabled children into severely and moderately learning disabled, differences in task performance according to severity of the learning disability might be obtained. Therefore several hypotheses were put forth.Primarily, severely learning disabled children were expected to perform the worst on the auditory selective attention task; normal children were expected to perform the best; moderately learning disabled children were expected to perform somewhere in between.The nature of the auditory selective attention task made it difficult to put forth definitive hypotheses about. This task comprised four conditions. With the exception of the Quiet subtest, which represented baseline responding, the other three subtests were expected to have differential effects on the three groups of subjects. Since the Voice subtest was created to be the most distracting condition (Goldman, Fristoe and Woodcock, 1974), a worsening in performance as one progressed from the Quiet subtest to the Voice subtest was expected. It was not clear, however, from the literature cited, whether there would be a clear-cut relationship between an increase in distractibility and an increase in severity of learning disability. Therefore, no specificity of outcome was assigned to the differential effects of the four subtests on the different types of subjects.With respect to the reflection-impulsivity dimension, it was hypothesized that one's tendency toward reflection or impulsivity affected one's academic achievement. Impulsives were, therefore, expected to perform worse than their reflective counterparts, as indicated by a higher percentage of impulsives among the severely learning disabled. It was felt that impulsivity in the learning disabled child would be primarily responsible for their poorer performance.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Year

1978

Author dc:creator

• Mishkin, Michael L

• Selective attention
• Reflection-impulsivity
• Learning disabilities

Repository record dc:identifier

https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/etd-collection/6922

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digitalcommons.library.uab.edu:etd-collection-7914