The sustained attention of 23 young adults with mild mental retardation and nonretarded subjects was assessed. Findings suggested that the sustained attention of the retarded differs from that of the nonretarded on those vigilance tasks that place demands on memory abilities. (Author/DB)

Four experiments explored the interrelations between working memory, attention, and eye movements. Observers had to identify a tilted line amongst vertical distractors. Each line was surrounded by a colored shape that could be precued by a matching item held in memory. Relative to a neutral baseline, in which no shapes matched the memory item,…

High-span individuals (as measured by the operation span [OSPAN] technique) are less likely than low-span individuals to notice their own names in an unattended auditory stream (A. R. A. Conway, N. Cowan, & M. F. Bunting, 2001). The possibility that OSPAN accounts for individual differences in auditory distraction on an immediate recall test was…

Modeling and attention-retention were examined in 20 boys (ages 9- to 14-years-old) attending a residential school for children with learning disabilities. (Author/DB)

This paper reports on two experiments conducted in an attempt to extend findings by Ellis which suggest a rehearsal deficit in mentally retarded subjects. In experiment one, mentally retarded subjects saw nine stimuli in a serial position probe task for either two, four, or six seconds each. Performances for the two and four second-per-item rates…

The vigilance of young adults with and without mild mental retardation (MR) was compared, with subjects performing two memory demanding, cognitively based tests. The vigilance decrement of MR adults declined more rapidly than did the vigilance of non-MR adults, due to an interaction between target detectability and response bias, and poor target…

Examined the learning of a manipulative response by well and at-risk infants of 6 to 13 months of age who had experienced respiratory interventions in the perinatal period. Risk status reliably predicted the learning performance. Results confirmed that the effects of perinatal interventions involving respiratory complications influenced infants'…

Although children and adolescents with high-functioning autism and Asperger syndrome present with some similar clinical features and challenges, heterogeneity of learning style coupled with the predominance of specific "packages" of materials and methods tends to understate the need for individualization when designing an educational and/or a…

This research study evaluated the effects of memory demand on sustained attention, by varying the time interval between the presentations of stimuli in a cognitive vigilance task. Sixteen retarded and 16 nonretarded adult observers performed four 60-minute visual vigilance tasks in which single digits were presented sequentially and successively…

Presents a proposed unifying relationship between instructional methods and cognitive operations, and argues that it is the location of the processing of the learning task that defines the function, type, and extent of the instructional method required. More than 50 references are listed. (MER)

Relations between infant information processing and specific cognitive outcomes at age 11 years were examined in a sample of preterm and full-term infants. Seven-month visual recognition memory and 1-year cross-modal transfer predicted 11-year intelligence quotient (IQ). (MDM)

This review surveys the empirical literature for assessments of learning problems in children from a neuropsychological perspective. An evaluation of children with learning problems must consider measures of working memory, attention, executive function, and comprehension (listening and written), particularly for children who do not respond to…