Sixteen adolescents with mental retardation and 16 typical adolescents participated in a negative priming procedure in two experiments. Unlike previous studies, this study found that subjects exhibited inhibition under instructions to respond on the basis of stimulus identity in a manner similar to that of individuals without mental retardation.…

This study with 50 adults with mental retardation, found that performance on the Facial Discrimination Task (Emotional and Age Tasks) was significantly correlated to the Cognitive Assessment System total score. Hierarchical regression analyses produced results suggesting that cognitive processes are involved in processing facial stimuli in a…

Research findings were reviewed on the Auditory Visual Combined Discrimination Test, which can be used with severely and profoundly mentally retarded persons to assess basic position, visual, and auditory discriminations. The test was found to be reliable and predictive of client performance in classroom learning, language, and vocational tasks.…

Two experiments with five individuals having severe mental retardation identified some problems and limits in training reversals of previously learned discrimination tasks using stimulus control shaping methodology. (DB)

The problem of teaching relational discriminations to people with mental retardation is examined. The limitations of several commonly used teaching procedures are discussed and alternative approaches to simple-discrimination learning are described. Results of two preliminary single-subject studies demonstrating the feasibility of these approaches…

The investigation of interactions between the abilities of stimulus discrimination and simple learning and two instructional variables (discrimination difficulty and degree of overlearning) with 27 mentally retarded adolescents found an interaction between stimulus discrimination and the number of words presented at one time for learning…

Abilities of individuals (n=42), either with or without mental retardation, to search for and detect changes to naturalistic scenes were investigated. Individuals with mental retardation required more time to detect changes, especially changes of marginal interest. Eye-tracking analysis of six participants suggested that individuals with mental…

This study examined whether 49 adults with mild or moderate mental retardation could perform reliably enough on the Penn Facial Discrimination Task to make this a useful research measure for evaluating visual-receptive processing. Results found subjects generally performed well above chance level, that retest reliability was reasonably high, and…

Five adults with Prader-Willi syndrome (characterized by short stature, learning difficulties, incomplete sexual development, and uncontrollable eating) learned the conditional relations necessary for the formation of two equivalence classes under differential/nondifferential and edible/nonedible outcomes. Performance on test trials was better…

The effectiveness of training procedures which used visual-visual arbitrary matching, blocked-trial matching-to-sample, and successive discrimination training to teach visual-visual discrimination of two-dimensional forms was evaluated with two men having severe mental retardation. Results indicated that the procedures did establish conditional…

Two studies compared performance on conditional and trial-unique delayed identity matching-to-sample procedures with five subjects having moderate to severe mental retardation and four subjects with mild mental retardation. Across the studies, six of nine subjects showed lower delayed-matching accuracy when fewer rather than more stimuli were…

In this study, 24 individuals (ages 6-37) with down syndrome had to learn a symbolic conditional discrimination task. Participants showed better terminal accuracy and faster learning of the task when the alternative correct responses were each followed by unique different outcomes than when nondifferential outcomes were arranged. (Contains…

This study examined the discriminability of lexigrams versus printed words with eight adults with severe mental retardation. A match-to-sample teaching paradigm was used. Subjects discriminated lexigrams better than printed letters and were more successful at matching lexigrams to referent objects than matching printed words to referent objects.…

Children with mental retardation are particularly prone to failure on relational tasks such as oddity and match-to-sample, suggesting a differential sensitivity to relational information. This paper reports on several studies in which characteristics of stimulus arrays were enhanced. Results demonstrated the theoretical and practical significance…