title: Effects of color on visual discrimination of geometric symbols by severely and profoundly mentally retarded individuals.
abstract: The effects of color on visual discrimination of symbols by severely and profoundly mentally retarded individuals were investigated. In Experiment 1, discriminative training with colors reliably associated with the backgrounds of symbols failed to transfer to those same symbols on black backgrounds. In Experiment 2, however, discriminative training with randomly colored symbols transferred to the same symbols in black. Transfer performance after training with randomly colored symbols was higher than was discriminative responding after identical training with black symbols. In Experiment 3, distinctive feature training with color randomly assigned only to distinctive features of symbols facilitated visual discriminations among symbols and transferred both to black whole symbols and black distinctive features at higher levels than did training with random coloration of entire symbols. These findings were discussed in terms of the attentional deficits of the subjects.
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D003118:Color Perception; D003463:Cues; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D004495:Education of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities; D005260:Female; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D008607:Intellectual Disability / Q000523:psychology*; D007360:Intelligence; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D012917:Social Adjustment; D014163:Transfer, Psychology