We explored the neuropsychological profile for executive functions of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to assess whether problems associated with the two most cited relevant processes--inhibition and attentional problems--were the core of any executive function difficulty. A battery of executive function tests was administered to 31 children with a clinical diagnosis of ADHD and to 33 normal control participants, all aged between 7 and 12. The executive function battery encompassed a number of tasks, selected because each had multiple measures: a sustained attention reaction time task, a related vigilance task, an adaptation of the Hayling Sentence Completion Test, an adaptation of the Brixton Spatial Rule Attainment Test, a Letter Fluency task, a number Stroop task, and an "n-back" working memory task. The overall pattern of the results fit well with those obtained in previous studies as far as abnormalities of the ADHD group in the domain of inhibitory processes, attentional functions, and executive functions. The children with ADHD, although performing well on baseline tasks, performed more poorly than the controls on all the experimental tasks with one borderline exception: Letter Fluency, where the children with ADHD showed a very different pattern than most adult frontal lobe subgroups. However, there was no specific impairment on measures of inhibitory processes. In addition, strategy generation and use were severely affected in the ADHD group. Particular findings fitted well with disorders of a high-level effort system and of a monitoring system.
No abstract
Background: The object of this study was to analyze the executive functioning of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or reading disability (RD) independent of their non-executive deficits. Methods: Three carefully diagnosed groups of children, aged between 7 and 12 years (35 ADHD, 22 RD and 30 typically developing children), were tested on a wide range of tasks related to five major domains of executive functioning (EF): inhibition, visual working memory, planning, cognitive flexibility, and verbal fluency. Additional tasks were selected for each domain to control for non-executive processing. Results: ADHD children were impaired on interference control, but not on prepotent and ongoing response suppression. ADHD showed deficits on visual working memory, planning, cognitive flexibility and phonetic fluency. RD children were impaired on phonetic fluency. The only EF measure that differentiated ADHD from RD was planning. Conclusions: The present sample of ADHD children showed several EF deficits, whereas RD children were almost spared executive dysfunction, but exhibited deficits in phonetic fluency.
In the present meta-analysis, we examined the effect of cognitive training on the Executive Functions (EFs) of preschool children (age range: 3-6 years). We selected a final set of 32 studies from 27 papers with a total sample of 123 effect sizes. We found an overall effect of cognitive training for improving EF (g = 0.352; k = 123; p < 0.001), without significant difference between near and far transfer effects on executive domains. No significant additional outcome effects were found for behavioral-and learning-related outcomes. Cognitive training programs for preschoolers are significantly more effective for developmentally at-risk children (ADHD or low socioeconomic status) than for children with typical development and without risks. Other significant moderators were: individual vs. group sessions and length of training. The number of sessions and computerized vs. non-computerized training were not significant moderators. This is the first demonstration of cognitive training for transfer effects among different executive processes. We discuss this result in relationship to the lower level of modularization of EFs in younger children.
This paper reports a selection of completed or ongoing studies that have evaluated or applied the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) in five countries of Southern Europe: Italy, Spain, Portugal, Croatia, and France. In Italy, the SDQ has been used to study its concurrent validity with other norm-based instruments (Child Behavior Checklist-CBCL and Disruptive Behavior Disorder Rating Scale-DBDRS), to assess the efficacy of a behavioural school training, and as part of an epidemiological study. In Spain, the SDQ was used to analyse the association between respiratory and other behavioural problems. In Portugal and Croatia, psychometric properties of the three versions of the SDQ (parent, teacher, and self-reports) were investigated in samples of children ranging from 5 to 16 years. Past and ongoing studies in France have administered the SDQ to estimate inter-rater agreement between parents, teachers, and pupils, to carry out a large-scale epidemiological study, and to evaluate the efficacy of a parent training programme. In a second section, scale means obtained with the teacher version of the SDQ in three community-based samples of 7-8 year-old children from Italy, Portugal, and Spain are compared. The results show that, according to their teachers' ratings, Italian pupils showed less prosocial behaviour than their Spanish and Portuguese agemates, whereas the Portuguese children were rated as being more hyperactive and inattentive than comparable Italian and Spanish children. Possible causes underlying the observed differences between national SDQ means are discussed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.