ABSTRACT
The developmental-difference controversy is fundamentally a debate about cognitive processes. Yet, one of its richest legacies is in the noncognitive realm. Here, I refer to the detailed account of metaintellectual and personality factors that influence the performance of retarded children. Factors such as outerdirec-tedness, low expectancy of success, wariness of adults, high levels or motivation for social reinforcement, and atypical hierarchies of reward preference (all discussed in a chapter by Zigler and Balla, in this volume) can taint performance on even the “purest” of our cognitive measures. Thus, many of the performance deficits manifested by retarded children are not necessarily a direct, inherent, or inexorable result of their lowered intellectual abilities. This suggests the hopeful possibility that a number of performance deficiencies may be remediable, or preventable, by means of interventions focused on problematic motivational and personality factors.
