title: Motivational orientation and span of apprehension in children with mental retardation.
abstract: Children diagnosed as mildly mentally retarded were examined with respect to performance on Estes's (1965) span-of-apprehension task. Based on their scores on the Simplified Version of the Intellectual Achievement Responsibility scale, we divided subjects into a "learned-helpless" group and a "mastery-oriented" group. Motivational orientation had a significant effect on performance, with the mastery-oriented subjects demonstrating higher detection accuracies than the learned-helpless subjects. These results have implications regarding not only centrally mediated attentional functioning in children with mental retardation, but also interpretation of certain previous findings with the span-of-apprehension task.
authors.affiliation: Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies, University of Kansas.
authors.forename: C A
authors.initials: CA
authors.lastname: Utley
authors.forename: T P
authors.initials: TP
authors.lastname: Hoehn
authors.forename: S A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Soraci
authors.forename: A A
authors.initials: AA
authors.lastname: Baumeister
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D002648:Child; D004495:Education of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities; D005260:Female; D006380:Helplessness, Learned; D006801:Humans; D008607:Intellectual Disability / Q000523:psychology*; D007389:Internal-External Control; D008297:Male; D009042:Motivation; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual