title: Assessing visual attention in young children and adolescents with severe mental retardation utilizing conditional-discrimination tasks and multiple testing procedures.
abstract: To effectively reduce overselective attention, a fine-grained analysis of the control exhibited by compound training cues is first needed. Computer software was developed in this study to administer two different stimulus control-testing procedures to assess how three young children of normal development and three adolescents with severe mental retardation attended to stimulus compounds when conditional-discrimination tasks were provided. One test assessed stimulus control by determining response accuracy for each component of the S+ compounds. The other testing procedure measured the response topographies of the compound stimuli using a touch screen attached to a computer monitor screen. After pretraining each stimulus component, all three children attended simultaneously to two elements in a conditional-discrimination task with few errors occurring. The adolescents with mental retardation eventually attended to both elements simultaneously but required more pretraining and exposure to the conditional-discrimination tasks before simultaneous attention occurred. Since the adolescents with severe mental retardation learned to simultaneously attend to multiple cues in the conditional-discrimination tasks, this demonstrated that restricted attention is not an unmodifiable perceptual characteristic among individuals with developmental disabilities. Recording response topographies with a touch screen was also discovered to be a sensitive measure of stimulus preferences for both groups. Utilizing touch-screen technology may prove to be critical for accurately identifying stimulus preferences and contribute to the understanding and treatment of overselective attention in students with attentional deficits.
authors.affiliation: Behavior Analysis & Technology, Inc., 61 Long Hill Road, P.O. Box 327, Groton, MA 01450-0327, USA. nhuguenin@ba-and-t.com
authors.forename: Nancy H
authors.initials: NH
authors.lastname: Huguenin
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D001288:Attention; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008607:Intellectual Disability; D008297:Male; D011581:Psychological Tests; D012054:Reinforcement, Psychology; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D014796:Visual Perception