UC Irvine

There is scant research on cognitive impairment in adults with learning disabilities (LD), even though at least some children with LD remain affected throughout adulthood. The present study was designed to examine several memory processes in adults with LD, including (a) recall with and without cueing, (b) item recognition, (c) proactive inhibition, and (d) semantically organized material. Twenty-one adults with learning disabilities (17 males and 4 females) between 18 and 33 years of age were compared with age matched controls (N = 88). There were two noteworthy findings: First, the adults with LD consistently overestimated their ability to remember lists of words; second, adults with LD were especially impaired in the test requiring termination of an exhaustive and thorough search for relevant material. The data suggest that level of expectation and organizational (structural) strategies are areas worthy of further investigation.