Modeling and Attention of Mentally Retarded, Learning Disabled, and Normal Boys

Abstract

Fifteen mentally retarded, 15 learning disabled, and 15 normal boys were equated on mental age and individually administered the Hagen Central-Incidental Task and presented a modeling tape for imitation. The results of this study suggest that mentally retarded children exhibit attention deficits when compared to MA-equivalent normals. The performances on attention tasks of the learning disabled children did not differ at the .05 level from the performances of the MA-equivalent normals. However, the mentally retarded and learning disabled children learned via observation as well as MA-equivalent normals. Central and incidental attention scores of the entire sample (N = 45) were significantly (p< .05) correlated to modeling scores. The findings of this study are compared with other investigations concerned with either attentional processes or observational learning characteristics of mentally retarded or learning disabled children.