Responses of normal and learning disabled children as a function of the stopwatch in the matching familiar figures testing situation

Abstract

To ascertain whether normal and hyperactive learning disabled children differ in their responses to Kagan's Matching Familiar Figures Test (MFF) as a function of a temporal cue, the stopwatch used in the testing situation, 16 learning disabled and 15 normal 8- and 9-year-old boys were compared. A counterbalanced design, in which each child was administered one-half of the test with a stopwatch (standard administration procedure) and the other one-half of the test without a stopwatch (No-Stopwatch procedure), was used. For the normal children, the MFF latency scores in the two conditions were not correlated, indicating that the stopwatch influenced their performance. For the learning disabled children, however, the MFF latency scores in the two conditions were correlated. A significant difference between the two correlation coefficients indicated that the normal and learning disabled children responded in a different manner to the temporal cue. On the MFF error measure, the correlation between the scores obtained in the two conditions of test administration was significant for the normal children, but not for the learning disabled children. A significant difference between these correlation coefficients again indicated differential responding to the temporal cue by the two groups.