Error awareness has been argued to depend on sensory feedback and interoceptive awareness (IA) (Ullsperger et al., 2010). We recorded EEG while participants performed a speeded Go/No-Go task in which they signaled error commission. Visibility of the effector was manipulated, while IA was measured with a heartbeat perception task. The late Pe was larger for aware than unaware errors. The ERN was also found to be modulated by error awareness, but only when the hand was visible, suggesting that its sensitivity to error awareness depends on the availability of visual sensory feedback. Only when the response hand was visible, the late Pe amplitude to aware errors correlated with IA, suggesting that sensory feedback and IA synergistically contribute to the emergence of error awareness. These findings underscore the idea that several sources of information accumulate in time following action execution in order to enable errors to break through and reach awareness.
ADHD is considered a disorder of self-regulation. Recent research has shown that awareness of bodily states, referred to as interoceptive awareness, crucially contributes to self-regulatory processes. Impaired self-regulation in ADHD has been explained in terms of arousal regulation deficits in ADHD (the state regulation deficit (SRD) account). There is now ample support for the SRD account, however the exact reason for arousal regulation difficulties is not yet known. The SRD account explicitly refers to the ability to monitor one’s momentary bodily state as a prerequisite for effective state regulation. However, surprisingly, no study to date has tested the ability to become aware of bodily signals, i.e. interoceptive awareness, in ADHD. In the current study, we therefore compared interoceptive awareness between 24 adults with ADHD and 23 controls by means of both an objective (heartbeat perception task) and subjective measure (questionnaire) of interoceptive awareness. Results revealed a strikingly similar performance for both groups on both measures, suggesting preserved interoceptive awareness in adult ADHD.
The current study examined the mechanisms of attention allocation in adult ADHD to investigate the frequently reported diminished target processing in ADHD as well as the less consistently observed increased distractibility by task-irrelevant distracting stimuli. To this end, while high-density EEG was recorded, 25 adults with ADHD and 23 healthy controls completed a 4-stimulus oddball task that comprised a frequently presented standard stimulus and 3 different categories of equally infrequent stimuli: task-relevant targets, task-irrelevant nontargets, and task-irrelevant unfamiliar novels. By applying specific contrasts, this allowed us to disentangle pure effects of 3 kinds of salience, namely targetness (targets vs. nontargets), deviance (nontargets vs. standards), and novelty (novels vs. nontargets). Distinct effects of targetness, deviance and novelty across several components were found. At the behavioral level, no group differences between adults with and without ADHD were observed. Contrary to our expectations, no difference between groups was found for the P3b amplitude to targets or the novelty P3 to nontargets and novels; however, in adults with ADHD a clear P3b to novels was apparent, which was absent in controls. This latter finding indicates deficient attention allocation in adults with ADHD, more specifically increased sustained processing of task-irrelevant novel events. (PsycINFO Database Record
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