Fifteen mentally retarded, 15 learning disabled, and 15 normal boys were equated on mental age and individually administered the Hagen Central-Incidental Task and presented a modeling tape for imitation. The results of this study suggest that mentally retarded children exhibit attention deficits when compared to MA-equivalent normals. The performances on attention tasks of the learning disabled children did not differ at the .05 level from the performances of the MA-equivalent normals. However, the mentally retarded and learning disabled children learned via observation as well as MA-equivalent normals. Central and incidental attention scores of the entire sample (N = 45) were significantly (p< .05) correlated to modeling scores. The findings of this study are compared with other investigations concerned with either attentional processes or observational learning characteristics of mentally retarded or learning disabled children.
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