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Some of the major areas in which people with intellectual disability are likely to experience deficits are attention, memory, language development, self-regulation, social development, and motivation. In considering the psychological and behavioral characteristics of persons with intellectual disability, we hasten to point out that a given individual with intellectual disability may not display all of these characteristics.

The importance of attention for learning is critical. A person must be able to attend to the task at hand before she or he can learn it. For years, researchers have posited that we can attribute many of the learning problems of persons with intellectual disability to attention problems. Often attending to the wrong things, they have difficulty allocating their attention properly.

One of the most consistent research findings is that people with intellectual disability have difficulty remembering information. Their deficits are widespread, but they often have particular problems with working memory. Working memory involves the ability to keep information in mind while simultaneously doing another cognitive task. Trying to remember an address while listening to instructions on how to get there is an example of working memory.

In general, the language of people who are intellectually disabled follows the same developmental course as that of ordinary people, but their language development starts later, progresses at a slower rate, and ends up at a lower level of development. They often experience problems with the ability both to understand and to produce language.

Self-regulation is a broad term referring to an individual's ability to regulate his or her own behavior. People who are intellectually disabled also have difficulties with metacognition, which is closely connected to the ability to self-regulate. Metacognition refers to a person's awareness of what strategies are needed to perform a task, the ability to plan how to use the strategies, and the evalu­ation of how well the strategies are working. Self-regulation is thus a component of metacognition.

People with intellectual disability are candidates for a variety of social problems. They often have problems making and keeping friends for at least two reasons: First, many do not seem to know how to strike up social interac­tions with others, and this differ­ence is evident as early as preschool. Second, even when they are not attempting to interact with others, they may exhibit be­haviors that put their peers off. For example, people with intellectual disability display higher rates of inattention and disruptive behavior than their normal classmates do.

Many of the problems pertaining to attention, memory, language development, self-regulation, and social development place people who are intellectually disabled at risk to de­velop problems of motivation. If these individuals have experienced a long history of failure, they can be at risk of developing learned helplessness—the feeling that no matter how hard they try, they will still fail. Believing that they have little control over what hap­pens to them and that they are primarily controlled by other people and events, some peo­ple with intellectual disability tend to give up easily when faced with challenging tasks.