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Overlearning effects on concept
attainment through "reversal-shift" in severly retarded
children. Roberto Truzoli, Rosalba Larcan, Pina Filippello Università degli Studi di Milano and Università degli Studi di Messina, Italy Concept learning processes in severely retarded children were investigated using the reversal shift. This paradigm allows to stress the relationships among different conceptual features. Shift skills require inplicit mediation processes related to the cognitive development. It has been hypothesized that if the mentally retarded children receive specific g and additional overlearning trials, they mìght perform correct discrimination, intradimensional (ID) and extradimensional (ED) shift. To 72 norinal subjects (5/6 years old) and 72 severely mental retarded children (14 years old), were administered two successive Ridimensionai discriminativi tasks. One half of the subjects in both mental level performed overlearning trials on the first task. Then, the subjects were asked to perform an ID, or an ED or a control task, according to conditìon groups. The results indicate that the severely retarded chíldren performances in ID and in ED shift improves with the overleaming trials training. They show almost the same learning rate as the nonnal subjects. Keywords: concept learning, retarded children, overlearning, reversal shift |
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