Effects of antipsychotic medication on discrimination learning for institutionalized adults who have mental retardation
✍ Scribed by Mark Carpenter; Charles A. Cowart; R. Steve McCallum; Sherry Mee Bell
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1990
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 759 KB
- Volume
- 5
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1072-0847
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Reduction in medication levels of drugs used to suppress inappropriate behavior (chlorpromazine, thioridazine and haloperidol) resulted in increases in performance on a discrimination learning task for seven residents of a state institution who are mentally retarded. After training to criterion on a matching-to-sample task, these participants experienced reductions in medication in an N of 1 AB replication paradigm. Two controls were medication free, and one remained on a stable dosage throughout. Improvement of performance on the first dependent variable (number of trials needed to meet criterion) ranged from 13.8% to 53.3% for the seven participants, while the three controls improved less than 1%. Improvement of performance on the second dependent variable (percentage of correct responses) ranged from 2.7% to 19.7% for experimental subjects; five of the seven subjects exhibited a minimum improvement of 8%. The change in percentage of correct responses for the three controls ranged from -4.9 to 1.3. Treatment implications are discussed.