American journal of mental deficiency最新文献

The influence of experience with mental retardation on nonretarded adults' ability to recognize facial expressions of emotion by young retarded children was examined. Four emotions were studied: happiness, anger, sadness, and neutrality (absence of affect). Slides of retarded and nonretarded children were presented to three groups: adults without experience in mental retardation, parents of retarded children, and teachers of the retarded stimulus children. Inexperienced adults identified fewer expressions of retarded children than did parents who, in turn, identified fewer expressions than did teachers. Teachers recognized expressions of retarded children best, inexperienced adults recognized expressions of nonretarded children best, and parents recognized expressions equally well in both retarded and nonretarded children. Happiness was recognized best in all children by all participants.

The reinforcing properties of vestibular stimulation were investigated, including the relative preference for vestibular stimulation and food, praise, visual, and auditory stimulation. Five multiply handicapped, severely retarded young children were trained to operate a pressure-sensitive adaptive switch to gain access to a given reinforcer during successive intervention phases. The results suggest that vestibular stimulation was reinforcing to all subjects. Vestibular stimulation appeared to be the preferred reinforcer for 4 of the 5 children. Results were discussed relative to the movement deprivation experienced by nonambulatory children. Possible implications for programming efforts were described.

The effectiveness of using parents as interventionists for their children and other parents was examined. A multiple baseline design was employed to measure the effects of specific intervention techniques on teaching skills of three parents of toddler-aged children with Down syndrome. The first parent was trained by a professional interventionist on the use of the techniques. This parent then trained a second parent, who then trained a third parent. A fidelity-of-implementation measure indicated that the parents implemented the training procedures appropriately when training another parent. The effectiveness of the intervention techniques was measured through an observational code that assessed parent and child behavior during teaching sessions. Results suggest that training had a functional effect on the parents' use of the selected intervention techniques. The intervention also had a functional effect on the children's percentage of correct responding during the teaching session.

A two-step procedure was used to investigate the dimensional structure of adaptive behavior of mildly, moderately, and severely mentally retarded people. The first step consisted of item factor analyses of the 66-item Client Development Evaluation Report for two derivation samples, each containing 3,024 subjects; results revealed a high degree of cross-sample similarity. Using the preceding results, we conducted parcel factor analyses for 14 samples of retarded people (average sample size, 676). These analyses resulted in a quite stable six-factor structure of adaptive behavior: Motor Development, Independent-Living Skills, Cognitive Competence, Social Competence, Social (or Extrapunitive) Maladaption, and Personal (or Intrapunitive) Maladaption. The implications for research and theory of the highly replicable six-factor structure of adaptive behavior were discussed.

The sensitivity of mentally retarded and nonretarded adults to changes in the structure of their perspectives when those changes are occluded from view during a walk was examined in two studies. Sensitivity was tested by starting participants at a target object located in one room of an unfamiliar office building, walking them via a circuitous path into a new room from which the target was occluded from view, and then asking them to aim a pointer straight at it. Direction judgments were collected across variations in the number of turns in the walk, spatial arrangements of rooms, amount of the subjects' attention available during the walk, and the availability of visual-environmental cues. Results indicate that retarded and nonretarded persons show similar levels of sensitivity to changes in perspective when they walk without visual-environmental cues (i.e., with eyes closed). In the presence of visual-environmental cues, however, the accuracy of nonretarded subjects increased dramatically whereas the retarded subjects did not improve at all. The similarities and differences in performance are related to differences in the perceptual learning thought to mediate use of proprioceptive cues and the inferential processes thought to mediate use of visual-environmental cues.

The claim that memory for spatial location is automatic was evaluated. Mentally retarded and nonretarded adults studied 16 objects on a matrix in front of them under one of two instructional conditions: intentional or incidental. They then tried to recall both the objects and their locations. Results showed that memory for spatial location was above chance under both instructional conditions. Intention to encode spatial location had no effect on recall. Finally, retarded and nonretarded adults differed in recall of the objects but not in recall of spatial locations. The findings support several of the criteria for automaticity proposed by Hasher and Zacks (1979) and suggest that automatic encoding of spatial location is an area of strength for retarded persons.

Mentally retarded adolescents and MA-matched nonretarded children participated in three experiments designed to examine differences in language-processing efficiency. A compressed speech technique was used in Experiments 1 and 2. Experiment 3 relied on a sentence-picture verification procedure. Our results suggest that retarded and nonretarded individuals differ in the speed with which they are able to execute the semantic-analytic processes but not necessarily the phonological encoding processes that are involved in auditory language comprehension. In addition, the data suggest a possible group difference in the quality of the semantic representation encoded during sentence processing.

Two treatment models, Intermediate Care Facilities for the Mentally Retarded (ICF/MR) and Foundation Care, were compared with respect to their use in the institutional treatment of nonambulatory profoundly mentally retarded persons. Foundation Care is focused on physical and social environmental components of caregiving through emphases on health, nourishment, nurturance, stimulation, and play, with the goal of habilitation. Subjects were randomly assigned to the treatment models. We hypothesized that when compared to ICF/MR, the Foundation Care unit would use more resident-oriented management practices, have different caregiver resident interaction, and have residents who would exhibit more behavioral complexity. Baseline, 6-month, and 1-year measurements were made. Results supported the first and third hypotheses. Caregiver resident interaction was similar for both groups; however, Foundation Care staff used more tactile modalities and contingent interaction. We conclude that Foundation Care may be an appropriate alternative level of care for the nonambulatory profoundly retarded person.

Ten mildly mentally retarded, 10 equal-CA matched, and 10 equal-MA matched nonretarded subjects were required to recognize both verbal (two-letter words) and nonverbal (polygons) stimuli presented tachistoscopically. A backward visual masking paradigm utilizing both monoptic and dichoptic masking and varying stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was employed. The mildly retarded subjects were significantly poorer at the most advantageous (longest) SOAs. The monoptic mask was more effective than was the dichoptic mask, with the three groups demonstrating similar masking functions.

The effect of level of stereotypy on learning a discrimination for 30 mentally retarded persons was examined. A factorial design with high and low levels of stereotypy and three levels of IQ was employed. The number of days to acquire the discrimination differed among the IQ groups, but there was no main effect of stereotypy. An interaction was found indicating that a high level of stereotypy slowed learning only in the lowest IQ group. We concluded that the effects of stereotypy upon learning were different across the IQ levels and that high levels of stereotypy did not uniformly interfere with the acquisition of the discrimination.