The Effect Of Selective Attention Level On Executive Function In Children With Moderate Mental Retardation

As one of the major groups of special children,mentally retarded children need support and intervention for life because of their low intelligence and impaired adaptive behavior.Executive function is to memorize,coordinate and control a variety of cognitive processes in order to achieve specific goals,so as to ensure the cognitive process of effective behaviors.As a major factor of affecting executive function,attention selectivity plays an important role in children's information screening,interference elimination and cognitive processing.Previous studies have found that the level of executive function of normal individuals is often influenced by the level of selective attention,but Professor Hao Xingchang believes that the results of normal subjects can not be directly extended to people with mental retardation,so there are still some doubts about the relationship between executive function of individuals with mental retardation and the level of selective attention.Therefore,to investigate the status of selective attention and executive function in children with mental retardation,and a clear relationship between selective attention and executive function,can not only better understand the status of mental development of these children,but also help to improve their attention and executive function.In this study,the visual search task paradigm was used to investigate the effects of individual selective attention level on the inhibition,conversion and refreshment of executive function of 31 middle-grade mental retarded children from the Department of Enlightenment of Changsha Special Education School by adapting GO/NOGO task,dimension card classification task and N-back task.At the same time,we are trying to use positive or negative feedback to induce these children's positive or negative emotions,and further investigate the effect of individual's selective attention level on executive function under different emotional involvement.The main conclusions are as follows:(1)Positive and negative feedback can induce positive and negative emotions of children with mental retardation and activate heat executive function effectively.The differences existed between hot and cold executive functions initiated by emotional involvement.(2)Selective attention is a factor that affects the executive function of children with moderate mental retardation.Different levels of selective attention reflects the difference of correct rate in executive function inhibitor and converter components,and the difference in response time in executive function refresher sub-components.(3)The types of emotional involvement affect the performance of heat executive function in children with moderate mental retardation.Positive emotions promote executive function,while negative emotions interfere with executive function,but they promote executive refresh function.(4)Selective attention affects not only emotional experience but also cognitive ability.The interaction between different levels of selective attention and emotional involvement has different effects in executive function inhibitors and converters.Positive emotion promotes executive function only in children with moderate mental retardation at high selective attention level,while negative emotion interferes with executive function more significantly in children with moderate mental retardation at a low selective attention level.The conclusion of this study provides an empirical foundation for revealing the effect of selective attention on executive function of moderate mental retarded children,and also provides inspiration for the intervention of children with mental retardation.