Attentional deficits of learning-disabled children: Effects of rewards and practice

This study investigated the effects of rewards and practice on the attentional task performance of learning-disabled (LD) and normally achieving children. Contingent feedback and rewards resulted in faster but less accurate performance by the LD children. Despite the speed-accuracy trade-off, the LD children still responded more slowly than the controls. However, limited practice on the tasks resulted in significantly improved performance, such that the groups performed similarly. Poorer performance of LD children on their first encounter with laboratory measures of attention may be due to inefficient strategies rather than to actual deficits in ability to attend.This paper is based on the author's dissertation. I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Nancy Ponzetti-Dyer, Susan Shapiro, and Duane Kemp in the data collection, and of Raymond Romanczyk and two anonymous reviewers for comments on a draft of this article.