Chapter 8: ‘Serial Access’ to Information

This chapter looks at the studies undertaken by the writer outlined so far in this volume and argues that all the evidence points a phenomenon whereby people with learning disabilities acquire information by what is akin to the ‘serial access’ term used in computing. In that domain, ‘serial access’ occurs where data are read from the storage medium in the order in which they were recorded until the required item is reached (Daintith & Wright, 2016). In such a system, each individual ‘bit’ of data is read – there is no judgement as to the value of reading any individual piece or section, no evaluating whether it is worth imbibing and therefore no filtering of information by ignoring or skipping it.