The Effect of Cognitive Interventions on Automatic and Effortiful Processing in Educable Mentally Retarded Students

For studying the effect of cognitive interventions on automatic and effortful processing in educable mentally retarded students, the modified Stroop effect was used as the training task, and the enumeration test was used as a measuring scale for automatic and effortful processes. Two groups of students (each group:8) from a special elementary school were selected, and on the basis of the time they had scored on the enumeration test in automatic and effortful processes, were matched as experimental and control ones. After 28 sessions of training where the modified Stroop effect task was used, the experimental and control groups were compared. Results indicated that there was an increase in the rate of processing in automatic and effortful modes in the experimental group, but it wasn't generalized to the enumeration task. Meanwhile; the regression coefficient showed that with an increase in training, the processing may speed up and result in faster performance in the enumeration task.