Motivational orientation and span of apprehension in children with mental retardation.
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.
Utley
C A
CA
Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies, University of Kansas.
Hoehn
T P
TP
Soraci
S A
SA
Baumeister
A A
AA
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