Inhibition Of Return In Junior School Students With Learning Disabilities

This research is a comparison study, aimed to explore the special features and the causes of deficiency in the visual search process of learning disabled children by investigating IOR. Based on the previous researches, the author designed five experiments to explore the characteristics and mechanisms of IOR. Experiment1and experiment2analyzed the time course and capacity of IOR; Experiments, experiment4and experiments assessed the mechanisms of IOR.Experiment1compared the performances of IOR time course between LD and normal children in detection and discrimination tasks. Results showed that the LD group took longer to activate IOR and terminated it earlier, as compared to the normal group. It suggested that LD group is impaired at attention activation and maintainance.Experiment2explored the differences between LD and control group in successive and simultaneous IOR tasks. It was found that compared to normal children, the IOR capacity of LD children was smaller, implying that LD children have limited visual space and difficulties of shifting attention.Experiment3used dynamic paradigm to discuss whether IOR coding is based on the cue locations or objects? It was found that both groups showed location-based IOR, but only normal children exhibited object-based IOR, which was even more dominant than the location-based one. The results implicated that for normal children, the object information coding is superior to location information coding, whereas LD children have difficulties in object information coding.Experiment4investigated the differences between LD and control group in congruent and incongruent cue-target conditions which separated the perception and response inhibition. Normal children showed significant response inhibition, suggesting that the main effect of attention existed in the process of response. On the contrary, the attention processes of LD children were unable to inhibit irrelevant stimuli.Experiments requested participants to predict which location the target would appear in a display containing eight possible ones on an imaginary circle, one of which was cued. The result showed that normal child had a bias to predict the position opposite to the cued one. But LD children preferred to the cued position. It implicated that the IOR has two independent components:inhibition and facilitation.Above all, in the visual searching process, the attention of LD children started slower, lasted shorter and could not shift from one position to another flexibly. There were three reasons leading to these problems:the LD children could only use single cue, could not inhibit irrelevant response efficiently and fail to monitor the uncued positions.The findings of this research enriched the knowledge of IOR mechanism and the research methods of studying the attention of special groups, explored the characteristics of LD children in attention processes. The results of this research can be used as the assessment and training materials for attention deficiency.