The renaissance in the field of mental retardation since World War II has been expressed both in research and in renewed practical concern for the plight of the retarded. The 1958 monograph by Masland, Sarason, and Gladwin entitled Mental Subnormality: Biological, Psychological, and Cultural Factors was one spur, if not the only one, to much of the behavioral research which emerged in the late 1950's. Similarly, the Handbook of Mental Deficiency, edited by Norman Ellis and published in 1963, gave theoretical direction to many studies in the years following its appearance. The present book and the symposium on which it is based are an attempt to continue this tradition by presenting theory-based, programmatic research in mental retardation, aimed at the scientific understanding of the psychological processes involved. The final chapter attempts to draw some of the implications of this research for the practical assessment and remediation of retardation. The experimental work reported in this book generally uses rather traditional laboratory tasks, for example, classical conditioning or discrimination learning. But the interest is in underlying processes rather than in such apparent trivia as whether the child blinks his eyelid or which of two stimulus objects he selects. Thus, this book is oriented around the psychological processes of interest, namely learning, attention, memory, language, thinking, and emotion, and concludes with a section on the relationship between these processes and the biological aspects of retardation. Donald K. Routh is professor of psychology at the University of Miami. He has served as the president of the American Psychological Foundation's Society of Clinical Psychology and School divisions. He is the founding director of the International Society of Child Psychology.
This book is dedicated to my wife, Marion W. Routh. In her way, she has been informally involved in clinica! psychology organizations for as many years as I have. She has also served for many years as the first reader of almost all manuscripts I ha ve written, including the one for this book. I can always depend on her to tell me straight out what she thinks. When she found out I was writing this book, she was afraid that the mass of detailed factual information I was gathering would be dull to read. Therefore, when I actually started writing, I laid aside all notes and just told the story in a way that flowed as freely as possible. {1 went back later to fill in the documentation and to correct factual errors that had crept in. ) When she looked over the first draft of the book, her comment was, "It is not as boring asI thought it would be. " Her frankness is so dependable that I knew from these words that there was hope, but that I had my work cut out forme in the revision process. By the middle of the second draft, she grudgingly had to admit that she was getting hooked on the book and kept asking where the next chapter was.
DONALD K. ROUTH WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT A reader who happens onto this book on the library shelf may find the title a puzzle. Learning is one broad subject. Speech is another. And the "complex effects of punishment" might seem far afield from either. Perhaps, intrigued by this apparent diversity and wanting to discover what common theme underlies it, the reader may begin leafing through the chapters. The first one recounts a series of studies of rats-using learning techniques from the psychology laboratory, to be sure, but applied to the study of behavior genetics, sex differences, and aging. The second chapter has to do with young children's discrimination learning. Then, there is a chapter on learning sets. Next, there is a chapter on stuttering. Then the topic shifts back to the study of learning in rats. Then, there is a clinical chapter on punishment effects. Finally, there is a historically oriented essay on Iowa psychology graduates. Surely, by now the puzzled reader wants an explana tion of why such diversity belongs between the covers of a single book.
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