Moore, Derek Graham; (1994) The nature of person perception: Experimental studies with mentally retarded and normal individuals. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The main thesis was that there may be 'modular' or 'direct' perceptual processes involved in extracting meanings from human bodily movements, and consequently that one would expect these processes to be intact in mentally retarded individuals. Five experimental tasks were administered to MA-matched groups of mentally retarded and non-retarded individuals. The first task was an Inspection Time (IT) task. The findings were that mentally retarded subjects required significantly longer exposures than MA-matched non-retarded subjects to accurately discriminate between stimuli on the basis of line-lengths. This finding confirmed previous reports that the efficiency of this form of visual information processing relates more to general intellectual capacities (IQ) than to developmental level (MA). The second task explored the speed with which subjects 'organise' and process point-light displays of objects and people. The findings were, that mentally retarded subjects were as able to rapidly extract meanings from these displays as non-retarded controls. The third task explored subjects' abilities to discriminate between briefly presented human, and non-human, point-light displays. This task was of similar design to the Inspection Time task, yet mentally retarded subjects performed as well as controls when discriminating between these type of stimuli. The fourth and fifth tasks explored subjects' abilities to spontaneously refer to the emotional nature of expressive human movements when presented in point-light form, and to name subjective states and actions in displays when requested to do so. The findings were that mentally retarded subjects were as likely as controls to spontaneously refer to emotional aspects of displays, and were as able, when requested, to name actions and states.

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