The Characteristics Of Selective Attention On Learning Disabilities In Primary Schools: An Eye Movement Study

Eye-movement were used to explore the characteristics of selective attention onlearning disabilities in primary schools. The subjects are36pupils. In a sense, they weredivided into two groups: the group of learning disabilities and the group of top pupils.They all have normal vision after corrected. They set on a special chair which has60cmdistance from the display, and their heads were fixed.In this study, response-competition paradigm is used under high and low perceptualloads, while under different interference types. Through analyzing the RT, accuracy rateand Eye-Movement data, we can examine deeply on the characteristics. In this study,there are two experimental tasks. Both of them are2×2×2experimental designs. Theaims of them are to research on the learning disabilities performance of selectiveattention by2different interference types and2perceptual loads respectively.They performed a selective attention task with varying perceptual loads andinterference types. The experiment materials were presented randomly. The perceptualload of the task was manipulated by changing the number of nontarget letters in the ringto create trials with set low load (only the target letter in the ring) and high load (targetplus five nontargets). The irrelevant distractors were neutral, incompatible or consistent.The experimental display was presented for3000ms. Participants were told that oneach trial, they would see a ring made up of letters or of letters and dots in the center ofthe screen and that one letter would be either an F or an J. They were to press the leftkey if an "F" was present and the right key if an "J" was present. It was emphasized thatthey should ignore the letters that were presented outside the ring. The RT, accuracyrate,duration, count for each trial was recorded by the Date viewer software.According to the experimental results, several conclusions of this study are asfollows:(1)Compared with top pupils, the learning disabilities have low capacity toprocess selective attention tasks;(2) The interference effect of interference stimulation is stronger on the task of low load for learning disabilities, but mainly reflected on thecount of stimulation interference. The accuracy rate on the different loads are almostsame;(3) As the result suggested, when irrelevant distractors is consistent orincompatible with target, it has greater interference effect than neutral interference typesfor learning disabilities.