Distractibility in Learning-Disabled Children

Abstract

Learning-disabled (LD) children are thought to be deficient in attention and memory performance, especially selective attention in the presence of distracting information. However, these findings have not always been confirmed and when these differential distraction effects are found they may be an artifact of the tasks' differential abilities to detect differences between groups. Two-digit span tasks were used to compare distraction performance of LD and normal learning (NL) children. On the first set of tasks, where the nondistraction and distraction conditions were matched, a priori for their ability to discriminate differences between groups, no differential distraction effect was found. In the second pair of tasks, the distraction condition was designed to make it more discriminating than the nondistraction condition and a differential distraction effect was found. These results are discussed in terms of the need for researchers to consider the psychometric properties of their tasks as important variables and as another potential explanation for some of the disparate findings in the distractibility literature with LD children.