Visual selective attention and impulsivity in learning‐disabled children

Subjects were 20 learning‐disabled (LD) children who were matched for mean age and IQ against a group of 20 non‐LD control children. A computer‐generated visual target identification task was used to assess visual selective attention capabilities. Subjects were asked to locate colored form targets (green squares) appearing amid an array of distractor stimuli. Distractors in disjunctive arrays shared no features with the target, whereas distractors in conjunctive arrays could share one feature—either color or form—with the target stimulus. LD children were faster than controls in correctly responding to targets, but no between‐group differences in accuracy were noted. Impulsive children — defined on the basis of performance in the Matching Familiar Figures (MFF) test —were significantly overrepresented in the LD group. Impulsive children were significantly less accurate at target identification for both array types than were reflective children. Both LD and impulsive children performed at normal levels in a test requiring the inhibitory modulation of motor output. Deficits in the automatic, preattentive processing of stimulus features are proposed to explain the performance impairments of impulsive children.