Question: Hi Stu, You said that you want to know how people with disabilities learn and their skills. My Questions is... Describe how you would work this out and how you would carry out your invention? What have you discovered since you have been working the science of disabilities?

Stuart Mourton answered on 13 Jun 2011:

Hi, the study i have carried out so far with typically developing subjects involves them making responses to stimuli (lights) be depressing buttons on a specially designed keyboard. What i would like to do is run this experiment again with people with disabilities (down’s syndrome for example) and see how features of their responses (like the time it takes them to respond) are different to those of the typically developing group. From this we can learn how their brains are responding to the tasks that we set them, and hopefully learn more about how they programme their responses.
Our initial research has thrown up some interesting discoveries. They are concerning some fairly complicated movement programming paradigms but essentially we have found that the way individuals with a disability make fast responses to targets is slightly different to the way typically developing people do. This means that we should probably train these individuals in a different way too and set different tasks for them when they’re learning novel skills. In this way they should be able to learn just as fast as the typically developing population and be just as good at a wide range of tasks from sporting based skills to those required in the workplace (typing etc)
Hope that answers your question, please feel free to ask anything else!!