Browsing by Subject "attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder"

Abnormal involuntary attention may lead to enhanced distractibility and has been proposed to be an underlying factor for cognitive problems in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In the present experiment, involuntary attention switching of 6–11-year-old ADHD and healthy children performing an auditory discrimination task was compared. Deterioration of task performance and event-related brain potentials (ERP) to distracting sounds associated with attention switching, were considered as measures of distractibility. During the experiment the children performed an auditory discrimination task in which they were instructed to differentiate two animal sounds from each other. In the task-related sounds presented from loudspeakers in front of the child there were occasional task-irrelevant changes in the sound location. In addition, novel sounds completely unrelated to the task were presented from behind. The hypothesis of the present study was that the ADHD children would get more distracted than the control children as a consequence of the deviance in the direction of the task-related sound and after an occurrence of a task-irrelevant novel sound. The performance of the ADHD group was highly variable. The task-irrelevant novel sounds prolonged the reaction times, decreased the accuracy, and increased the number of omitted responses in the ADHD group more than in the control group. In addition, abnormalities in the ERPs suggest that the ADHD group was more distracted than the control group by the deviances in the task-related sounds and by the novel sounds and that the ADHD group processes the sounds partly in different brain regions than the control group. To understand these regional and functional abnormalities in more detail, additional research is required.