Effects of verbal rehearsal on discrimination learning in moderately retarded and nursery-school children.

In a simultaneous discrimination task with intradimensional shift, low-IQ and average-IQ children were required either to rehearse audibly a phase relating the positive cue to reward or not to rehearse audibly. A limited number of rehearsal trials substantially reduced discrimination errors and the facilitating effect transferred fully when new color cues were introduced and audible rehearsal stopped. Retarded subjects tended to need extra prompting to rehearse, but their discrimination performance showed no reliable deficit. It seems valuable to view the equal-MA deficit that retarded subjects have previously displayed on discrimination tasks as a consequence of deficiency in short-term memory strategies.