Teaching Visual Attention in Functional Contexts: Acquisition and Generalization of Complex Visual Motor Skills

Abstract

A three-year-old girl with multiple severe disabilities including aphakia was taught to visually attend to stimulus items in a training program that emphasized functional, age-appropriate visual motor tasks that required the use of vision for successful task completion. Within these task contexts, use of a repeated prompting procedure was successful in establishing visual attention, and generalization of visual attention to untrained tasks was observed. Additionally, increases in visual attention, whether trained or generalized, were associated with improved motor skill accuracy in the absence of any direct motor skill training on several tasks. Results are discussed in terms of classroom implications for vision “stimulation” programs and in terms of visual attention as a critical skill that may show multiple treatment effects.