Empirical studies are reviewed that have supported viewing the hyperkinetic syndrome and the related diagnoses of minimal brain dysfunction and learning disability as dysfunctions of information processing. Measures of arousal, attention, learning, and performance were examined in undrugged hyperkinetics, hyperkinetics given stimulant medication, and nonhyperkinetic children. Although support is found for the hypotheses that hyperkinetics exhibit low physiological arousal and poor attention, several findings indicate the need for modifying these hypotheses. Little evidence is found for the hypothesis that hyperkinetics have reduced sensitivity to reinforcement. The authors propose some theoretical clarifications of the arousal and attention hypotheses and suggest some directions for future empirical work.Hyperactivity is denned as an excessive amount of gross motor activity and/or an excessive amount of inappropriate activity (Werry & Sprague, 1970). It is one of the most prevalent symptoms exhibited by children referred to mental health clinics (Patterson, Jones, Whittier, & Wright, 1965). Hyperactivity may occur as a symptom in neurotic, schizophrenic, or prepsychopathic disorders, or it may occur in the behavior disorder known as the hyperkinetic syndrome. The hyperkinetic syndrome is characterized by the long-standing presence of hyperactivity as a chief complaint in children who exhibit normal intelligence, and it is usually accompanied by short attention span, low frustration tolerance, and impulsive behavior. Hyperkinetic children often perform poorly in school, are aggressive, and have poor relationships with their peers. These symptoms create problems for these children

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Previous laboratory studies that have either introduced extraneous enviromental stimulation or tested children in cubicles have failed to provide support for the common clinical notion that hyperkinetic children are highly distractible. Based on the Rosenthal and Allen (1978) proposal, distractibility was investigated by introducing irrelevant information within the task context. Intratask distractibility was examined by comparing the performance of hyperkinetic and nonhyperkinetic children on a speeded classification task. Errors measured for responses to slides containing either zero, constant, one varying, or two varying irrelevant stimulus dimensions. Dimensional salience of the three dimensions used in the study was measured for each child. The data indicate that hyperkinetics made more errors than nonhyperkinetics when constant irrelevant or two varying irrelevant dimensions were presented, but the two groups made equal errors when there was no irrelevant information presented within the stimulus array. No group differences in distractibility were found when the irrelevant dimension was low salience. It was concluded that salience of distractors presented within the task context may be useful in specifying the particular task conditions in which hyperkinetic children exhibit high distractibility.

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Research studies are briefly reviewed to examine the hypothesis that delinquent adolescents may process information in a different manner than non-delinquents. Studies suggest that delinquents may have less control over which information they attend to, may expose themselves to more stimulation, may process information more slowly, and may selectively attend to different information than matched controls. Findings from a recent study are presented in support of the latter hypothesis. A clinical example illustrates how these attention differences may appear in the course of treatment.