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While many child psychotherapists will not find this book of direct relevance to their work, those who work with children who have certain
learning difficulties may be interested in some of its findings. Fellows presents a painstaking and critical study of the literature on experimental studies of the discrimination process, together with some of his own findings and hypotheses. His aims are: “first, to develop a model showing the operations involved in the process of discrimination; and second, to investigate the developmental features of these operations.”
Fellows relates his work primarily to children's reading difficulties, especially to the discrimination of letters which differ only in orientation. He breaks down the sequence of perception and response into numerous stages at which difficulties can arise, and makes a start on a developmental timetable for the establishment in children of the various cognitive and perceptual processes involved in discrimination. The reviewer was particularly interested in the finding that in young or backward children training on appropriate (similar) tasks can be effective in improving discrimination where verbal instruction is ineffective; difficulties often arise from the failure to direct attention to the appropriate aspects of figures to be discriminated, rather than at later stages in the perceptual sequence. Fellows does not specifically relate his work to psychotic or brain-damaged children, but this seems the kind of detailed investigation that can throw light on the perceptual difficulties often encountered in these children.