The present study examines the hypothesis that motor responses added into rote tasks would modulate the sensation-seeking activity and impulsive errors of hyperactive (ADD-H) children. To this purpose 22 ADD-H and 25 comparison children were administered two repetitive tasks (word decoding and an auditory vigilance task) under both an active response and a passive response condition. Findings were that the impulsive errors, talking/noisemaking, and activity of ADD-H children was normalized (i.e., did not differ from comparison children) only in the high stimulation active response conditions. Behavioral improvements for ADD-H children were documented in both tasks in the active condition, but performance gains were found only in the vigilance task. The findings supported predictions derived from the optimal stimulation theory that the excessive activity and attraction to novel stimuli of ADD-H children can be channeled into appropriate instrumental motor and attention responses.

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Perceptual differences were examined for four boys identified with fetal alcohol effect (FAE) and labeled learning disabled for educational purposes. Without a model, all FAE boys built asymmetrical building block designs with no stacking of blocks. When the boys were shown a short videotape of a peer building a simple symmetrical structure with one-layer stacking of blocks, none of the FAE boys successfully imitated. They continued to place blocks randomly on the floor surface with no stacking or layering. This limited study suggests modeling perceptual tasks may not be an effective teaching strategy for children identified with fetal alcohol effect and such children may not be able to learn new skills using demonstration or modeling.

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