The inhibition of exogenous distracting information in children with learning disabilities

Several studies have shown that children with learning disabilities (LD) have difficulty in inhibiting irrelevant information, which generates endogenous interference from working memory. Other inhibition capacities have not yet been investigated, however. This article reports on an experiment examining the capacities of children with LD to inhibit exogenous interference, such as automatic, prepotent responses and distractor interference. Fifteen 11-year-old children with LD and 15 matched controls completed four tasks of inhibition, using the Stroop and Eriksen's flanker paradigms. To test the hypothesis that inhibition can be differentiated in terms of the type of material it acts on, each paradigm was used with numerical and nonnumerical stimuli. Our results showed that children with LD did not exhibit significantly larger interference effects than controls. Moreover, the pattern of results did not differ according to the type of material used. These findings indicate that children with LD do not show impairment in the inhibition of exogenous information--a finding that contradicts the material-specific inhibition hypothesis.