Consequences of Learned Helplessness and Recognition of the State of Cognitive Exhaustion in Persons with Mild Intellectual Disability

Abstract

Persons with intellectual disability are a group at risk of being exposed to overly demanding problem-solving situations, which may produce learned helplessness. The research was based on the informational model of learned helplessness. The consequences of exposure to an unsolvable task and the ability to recognize the symptoms of cognitive exhaustion were tested in 120 students with mild intellectual disability. After the exposure to the unsolvable task, persons in the experimental group obtained lower results than the control group in the escape/avoidance learning task, but a similar result was found in the divergent thinking fluency task. Also, participants in the experimental group had difficulties recognizing the symptoms of the cognitive exhaustion state. After a week's time, the difference in escape/avoidance learning performance was still observed. The results indicate that exposure to unsolvable tasks may negatively influence the cognitive performance in persons with intellectual disability, although those persons may not identify the cognitive state related to lowered performance.

Keywords: avoidance learning; cognitive exhaustion; divergent thinking; fluency; intellectual disability; learned helplessness.

Figure 1.

The pair of cards used in the discrimination task.

Figure 2.

The diagram presenting the experimental procedure.

Figure 3.

Mean certainty of accuracy for the first and second three tasks in the first and second series (meeting) shown for the control and experimental group. The bars show 95% confidence intervals for the means.

Figure 4.

Mean proportion of signals for which the participants responded either before they started (prevented) or over the time of their duration (stopped) in the first and second meeting shown for the control and experimental group. The bars show 95% confidence intervals for the means.