Coding Strategies of Normal and Handicapped Children

This chapter reports the results of experiments carried out with children who suffer from either specific perceptual or general cognitive handicaps. The studies represent an attempt to compare the effects of such specific sensory handicaps with general cognitive deficit, but they were also intended as a breaking away from the traditional role of psychology in relation to psychiatry, a role in which psychologists have tended to accept uncritically the classificatory framework of clinically defined groups or, alternatively, to reject such diagnostically defined groupings out of hand. A further source for these studies lay in the problems which characterize the psychological investigation of subnormality, which had for long been dominated by the important concept of intelligence. Although the experimental investigation of general cognitive handicap has proceeded in the last two decades by specific investigations concerned with learning processes, this particular departure from the traditional approach via the intelligence test could nonetheless be criticized. Explicitly or implicitly, most experimental workers in the field of subnormality have assumed the existence of a linear information-handling process, beginning with the focusing of attention and followed by perception and short-term retention of input. The categorization of this retained input in long-term memory, the selection of a verbal equivalent, and the subsequent verbal or motor output associated with the stimulus have been the other stages which have been presumed.