ABSTRACT
It was stated in Chapters 4 & 5 that it was a hazardous undertaking to draw inferences about psychological processes in children and in handicapped people. It was concluded that it is in principle impossible ever to infer that a psychological process is not available to such subjects. On the other hand, it was also maintained that care must be taken in inferring from any single performance that a process is available. For it has to be established that the performance in question can only occur as the result of the occurrence of the postulated process. Further, any performance of the sort we are interested in will require the use of other processes in addition to that in which the experimenter is interested. Free recall, for example, requires attentional and perceptual processes as well as secondary. Therefore there is considerable danger of confounding the effects of one process with those of another.
