Covert visual attention in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: Evidence for developmental immaturity?

Abstract

Shifts in covert visual attention were compared in children with and without Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) to determine if children with ADHD have developmental immaturities in covert attention, relative to their non-ADHD peers. Children were told to orient attention to a central fixation point and were then cued, by both central and peripheral cues, to direct their attention to either the left or right peripheral fields. Following variable time intervals, the target appeared and reaction times and errors were recorded. Although performance of all subjects showed faciliation when attention was directed by valid cues and inhibition when attention was directed by invalid cues, the performance of children with ADHD was far more disrupted when their attention was misled by invalid cues, especially at longer intervals. This inconsistency was reflected in significantly higher error rates in the ADHD group. They also showed a pattern of attentional “waxing and waning” in performance over longer time intervals that has been previously found in auditory attention switching over time within trials in children with ADHD. Overall, results are inconsistent with developmentally immature covert attention skills in ADHD. Findings are discussed in terms of the concept of global “developmental immaturity” in the attention skills of children with ADHD.

Disengagement and inhibition of visual–spatial attention are differently impaired in children with rolandic epilepsy and Panayiotopoulos syndrome

“…Not only epilepsy, in general, but also rolandic discharges or underlying mechanisms of epileptogenesis have been claimed to aggravate ADHD [109,112,113]. We have just seen that ADHD is associated with RT inconsistency for targets displayed after invalid or neutral cues [101]. Our results suggest that this slight abnormality could turn into a true deficit in reorienting attention when accentuated by the impact of interictal paroxysmal activity focused on the right hemisphere.…”

“…Taken together, effect sizes were very heterogeneous, and inconsistent RTs for targets following invalid and neutral cues have been reported in children with ADHD [101]. Consequently, ADHD did not appear to be characterized by significant visual orienting dysfunction.…”

Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Event-Related Potentials: Evidence for Deficits in Allocating Attentional Resources to Relevant Stimuli

“…Children with ADHD exhibit a pattern of waxing and waning such that, as compared to non-ADHD children, they are not as flexible over time in reorienting their attention from one location to another. In the presence of invalid or neutral cues for target location, the subsequent performance of children with ADHD is disrupted and never fully recovers (Pearson et al, 1995). Although these findings suggest that children with ADHD exhibit deficits in primary components of selective attention, namely, covert attention, the literature has been inconclusive with respect to general selective attention deficits and several factors have been associated with selective attention deficits in ADHD.…”

“…In contrast to the view that the core deficits in ADHD are attentional in nature (Douglas, 1972(Douglas, , 1983Pearson & Lane, 1990;Pearson et al, 1995), there is evidence to suggest that children with ADHD are not at all deficient in attentional processes, but are impaired in the development of response inhibition (Barkley, 1994). According to this view, impaired delayed responding results in a hypersensitivity to respond to immediate and compelling stimuli.…”

“…Although selective attention deficits have not been routinely found in children with ADHD (Douglas, 1983;Tarnowski et al, 1986), one aspect of selective attention, covert visual or auditory attention, has been found to be impaired in children with ADHD (Pearson & Lane, 1990;Pearson, Yaffee, Loveland, & Norton, 1995). For example, covert visual attention involves the shifting of attention across the visual field without actual eye movements, and is typically measured using a reorientation task.…”