Eye movements and conservation acceleration in mildly retarded children.
Thirty mildly retarded elementary-school children, 15 of whom had received perceptual/attentional training, were tested on four Piagetian conservation tasks (number, length, and continuous quantity solid/liquid) presented on 16 mm movie film with taped instructions. Eye movements were recorded during the response period for each task. Subsequent analyses of eye-movement patterns showed clear differences between the training and control groups. Trained conservers showed more visual exploratory activity and less perceptual centration than control group subjects. Moreover the eye-movement patterns of trained conservers closely approximated those shown by natural (i.e., untrained) retarded conservers in a previous study. The findings were discussed in terms of possible cognitive structural changes resulting from training and possible cognitive structural differences between mildly retarded and nonretarded children.
D002648:Child; D003071:Cognition; D003118:Color Perception; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D004495:Education of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities; D005133:Eye Movements; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009949:Orientation; D012858:Size Perception; D013028:Space Perception; D014163:Transfer, Psychology; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014796:Visual Perception