Motivational Orientation and Span of Apprehension in Children with Mental Retardation

Children diagnosed as mildly mentally retarded were examined with respect to performance on Estes's (1965) span-of-apprehension task. Based on their scores on the Simplified Version of the Intellectual Achievement Responsibility scale, we divided subjects into a "learned-helpless" group and a "mastery-oriented" group. Motivational orientation had a significant effect on performance, with the mastery-oriented subjects demonstrating higher detection accuracies than the learned-helpless subjects. These results have implications regarding not only centrally mediated attentional functioning in children with mental retardation, but also interpretation of certain previous findings with the span-of-apprehension task.