A randomised control trial assessing the effects of an adaptive attention training intervention in children with Intellectual Disabilities.

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The ability to concentrate and stay focused on a task, to switch attention between tasks, to inhibit impulsive responding, and to mentally hold and use information are critical skills for learning and academic outcomes. The development of these skills, collectively known as Executive Functions (EF), begins early in life and become progressively more robust from the preschool years onwards. Recent studies highlight that EF’s serve as predictors of literacy and numeracy scores in preschool through high school, facilitate social inclusion and peer relationships, and play an important role in maintaining mental health across the lifespan. Fundamental to EF skills is the construct of “attention”, a set of cognitive processes that gate learning more generally. Disruption to these essential processes can lead to increased levels of distractibility, impulsivity, forgetfulness and poor focus. In the case of children who are especially vulnerable to learning impairments because of an underlying intellectual disability (e.g. autism, Down Syndrome), attention difficulties will likely exacerbate an already compromised cognitive system by significantly impacting on a developing child’s ability to interact with the world and community around them. This will in turn reduce their capacity to engage in educational programs, and increase their already heightened risk of long-term behavioural and emotional problems. The high prevalence of Australian children and adolescents with intellectual disabilities, estimated at 650,000 (approximately 3% of the population) warrants an extensive and inclusive program of research that will investigate how core attention skills can be captured and strengthened in young children in order to maximise learning capacity from as early as possible in development. We propose to address this unmet need by delivering a novel attention training program that is targeted at primary school children with Intellectual disabilities. Our proposed project therefore hypothesises that the attention training program will improve inattentive behaviours in the classroom and home. As well as hypothesising that the attention training program will increase performance on other non-trained cognitive skills (working memory, math and literacy). Finally we hypothesise that the attention training program will result in sustained improvements in inattentive behaviours and performance on cognitive tasks 3 months after completion of the intervention.

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