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Effects of antipsychotic medication on discrimination learning for institutionalized adults who have mental retardation
Author(s) -
Carpenter Mark,
Cowart Charles A.,
McCallum R. Steve,
Bell Sherry Mee
Publication year - 1990
Publication title -
behavioral interventions
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.605
H-Index - 34
eISSN - 1099-078X
pISSN - 1072-0847
DOI - 10.1002/bin.2360050205
Subject(s) - haloperidol , thioridazine , psychology , chlorpromazine , antipsychotic , schizophrenia (object oriented programming) , learning disability , task (project management) , mentally retarded , audiology , psychiatry , matching (statistics) , clinical psychology , developmental psychology , medicine , management , pathology , neuroscience , economics , dopamine
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.