Attention Training Procedures

Description of the Strategy

Children with developmental disabilities often have difficulties attending to important features of environmental stimuli. These attentional deficits are most keenly experienced during preacademic and academic skills teaching for some children. For example, a child may show difficulties distinguishing between the printed words bat and cat because he or she fails to attend to the first letter of each of the words. In this example, the beginning letters can be regarded as the critical, relevant, or distinctive features of the two stimuli, as it is based on those letters that a distinction between the two words can be drawn. A similar difficulty is when the child attends to only a restricted number of relevant stimulus features, such as overattending to ...