Eye movements and conservation acceleration in mildly retarded children

Thirty mildly retarded elementary-school children, 15 of whom had received perceptual/attentional training, were tested on four Piagetian conservation tasks (number, length, and continuous quantity solid/liquid) presented on 16 mm movie film with taped instructions. Eye movements were recorded during the response period for each task. Subsequent analyses of eye-movement patterns showed clear differences between the training and control groups. Trained conservers showed more visual exploratory activity and less perceptual centration than control group subjects. Moreover the eye-movement patterns of trained conservers closely approximated those shown by natural (i.e., untrained) retarded conservers in a previous study. The findings were discussed in terms of possible cognitive structural changes resulting from training and possible cognitive structural differences between mildly retarded and nonretarded children.