Visual Attentional Differences in Psychology Students With and Without Disabilities: A Pilot Study Assessing The Flanker Task For Prescriptive Visual Accommodative Technologies

Anders Chan Zachary I. Harkinish-Murray Sabrina Colmone Jessica E. Orens Sharon Thomas Nicole Albanese Katherine McCabe Rui Freitas Stephanie Bailey Ravi L. Ramdhari Michael T. Verrengia Kainaat F. Siddiqui Oscar E Lopez Stacey DeFelice Basabi Runi Mukherji Lorenz S. Neuwirth, Ph.D. ^*

• State University of New York at Old Westbury, Old Westbury, United States

The percentage of college students with disabilities has been growing and has doubled in the last two decades; thus, students with disabilities are pursuing college degrees in increasing numbers. Unfortunately, this population growth has not been matched with growth in available accommodative technologies in institutions of higher learning. Colleges and universities often do not have resources to fund and provide specific accommodative technology and support for this steadily increasing population. What is worse is that there is also a lag in emergent assessment and screening tools which are required to match student disabilities with appropriate accommodative technologies, resulting in a mismatch between student needs with appropriate accommodative technologies.The present pilot study was conducted with students with a range of disabilities, such as learning disabilities, emotional or psychiatric conditions, orthopedic or mobility impairments, attention deficit disorder/attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, health impairments (HI), and multiple disabilities) which were assessed using a Flanker Task, specifically to determine how sensitive it was in detecting differences in their visual attention performance. This information could be used to predict whether the student would benefit from specific accommodative technologies.Materials and Methods: Undergraduate Psychology students with and without disabilities volunteered to participate in a triple-blind study that sought to investigate whether their visual attention performance on a 10-minute Flanker Task could be used to predict which students might benefit from visual accommodative technologies. The first experiment was used as a negative control