Assessment of Sensorimotor Abilities of Severely Retarded Children and Adolescents

Sensorimotor cognition has been used successfully as a general framework for describing performance of severely retarded children. Only limited information is available, however, concerning specific patterns of acquisition across different domains of sensorimotor functioning. The current study is an investigation of the order of acquisition of domains by severely retarded children and adolescents. Results indicated that Performance in the object permanence domain always equaled or exceeded means-ends, which in turn always equaled or exceeded gestural imitation, which equaled or exceeded causality for 23 of 25 subjects. Congruence between domains (the degree to which performance was similar) ranged from 28% to 100%. Those domains that include a high percentage of social items were performed less well than those domains containing few social items. Differences between nonretarded infants and retarded infants and adolescents are reviewed.