title: Assessing same/different judgments in individuals with severe intellectual disabilities: a status report.
abstract: This report summarizes state-of-the-art approaches for assessing visual stimulus same/different judgments in individuals with severe intellectual disabilities. Methods are described that permit one to conduct assessments on a population-wide basis, excluding few if any participants due to failure to acquire necessary baseline performances. Methodological investigations summarized here indicate that one can obtain reliable same/different judgments with a variety of stimuli in virtually anyone for whom a basal score on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test can be obtained. This approach includes judgments involving not only familiar, readily nameable stimuli, but also abstract two-dimensional forms of the type commonly used to minimize extraexperimental influences on performance. Taken together, recent findings lead to the conclusion that past studies have significantly under-estimated the capacity of participants with low MA scores to make same/different judgments. They also suggest a more general methodological approach that can potentially lead to more sensitive assessment of other behavioral capacities in this difficult-to-test population.
authors.affiliation: Behavioral Sciences Division, E. K. Shriver Center, Waltham, MA 02254, USA. rserna@shriver.org
authors.forename: R W
authors.initials: RW
authors.lastname: Serna
authors.forename: W V
authors.initials: WV
authors.lastname: Dube
authors.forename: W J
authors.initials: WJ
authors.lastname: McIlvane
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D004495:Education of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities; D006801:Humans; D008607:Intellectual Disability / Q000523:psychology*; D007360:Intelligence; D011939:Mental Recall; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual