THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INTELLIGENCE AND VIGILANCE IN CHILDREN AT RISK

The purpose of this study was to compare two competing models as an ex planation of the relationship between intelligence and sustained atten tion in educationally at-risk kindergarten children. One model assumes that lower-IQ subjects allocate greater amounts of attentional resour ces to information-processing tasks than higher-IQ subjects, whereas t he other model assumes that a ''less-than'' optimal level of arousal i s associated with decrements in task performance across time. Twenty-n ine teacher-nominated at-risk and 29 normal achieving kindergarten stu dents were administered the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of In telligence-Revised (WPPSI-R) and vigilance tasks. Signal detection mea sures of stimulus detectability (d'), decision criterion (beta), corre ct detections, and false alarms were used to assess children's sustain ed attention across three time periods (2, 4, and 6 min). The importan t results were (a) high-risk children were inferior on d' measures whe n compared to normal achieving children (b) vigilance measures did not vary over time in either group, and (c) intelligence and vigilance sh ared a common factor in high-risk, but not low-risk, children. The res ults suggest that children educationally at risk suffer deficits relat ed to attentional capacity for processing information.