Operant Conditioning of Mental Retardates' Visual Monitoring

Abstract

To study improvement of visual monitoring of retardates, specialized training methods backed up by incentives were used. The extent to which these training techniques might be expected to produce results which would generalize to those situations in which the retardate was required to monitor without the increased signal rate and knowledge of results was explored. Subjects were 8 female mental retardates with IQs from 38 to 69. Detection of an aperiodic pattern change during pre-training was compared with final performance after 4 training sessions. During training, the task difficulty was increased until during the final training session it approximated the test conditions. Immediate knowledge of results was given for correct detections and false positive responses. Tokens were given to the subjects, based on the score at the end of the session. After the final session these tokens were exchanged for prizes. As predicted, training under these conditions significantly enhanced the retardates' performance and transferred to the condition with no knowledge of results.