Sixteen patients with Parkinson's disease (PD), 15 older controls (OCs), and 109 younger controls (YCs) were compared in 2 category-learning tasks. Participants attempted to assign colored geometric figures to 1 of 2 categories. In rule-based tasks, category membership was defined by an explicit rule that was easy to verbalize, whereas in information-integration tasks, there was no salient verbal rule and accuracy was maximized only if information from 3 stimulus components was integrated at some predecisional stage. The YCs performed the best on both tasks. The PD patients were highly impaired compared with the OCs, in the rule-based categorization task but were not different from the OCs in the information-integration task. These results support the hypothesis that learning in these 2 tasks is mediated by functionally separate systems.

Little is known about the way children with learning disabilities (LD) develop an understanding of their disability. In this study, 95 students (23 elementary and 72 junior high) were interviewed to determine how they were informed about their learning disability and what they knew about it. Students were also administered two questionnaires, Harter's What I Am Like and Heyman's Self-Perception of a Learning Disability (SPLD). All students reported being told about their learning problems either by their parents, school personnel, or "no one." Contrary to our hypothesis, increased knowledge about LD was not associated with higher self-esteem. Understanding of one's LD was associated with actual and perceived scholastic competence, while global self-esteem was associated with perceptions of competence in nonacademic domains. Concerns about current measures of self-understanding and future directions for helping children with LD understand their disability and maintain their self-esteem are discussed.

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