Exploring selective attention in ADHD: visual search through space and time

Abstract

Children with ADHD were not impaired in their mechanisms of visual search relative to controls, but their error patterns implied the adoption of a premature response deadline in the conjunction search condition, and an occasional failure to inhibit old items in the preview condition.

Association of the dopamine transporter (DAT1) 10/10-repeat genotype with ADHD symptoms and response inhibition in a general population sample

“…Furthermore, our finding is consistent with recent work that has also failed to find a specific ADHD deficit in selective attention. 88,89 Contrary to our hypothesis, we found no evidence of an association between the DAT1 10/10 genotype and performance on working memory measures (irrespective of the subcomponent) and on a measure of sustained attention. Performance on the latter task was predicted only by high ADHD scores.…”

Which Behavioral and Personality Characteristics Are Associated With Difficulties in Selective Attention?

“…A target defined on the basis of a conjunction of features relative to distractors (e.g., shape and color) tends to be harder to detect by identifying just one feature, as reaction times (RTs) slow down in a linear fashion indicating an increase in the number of distractors. Conjunction search depends on attention-demanding serial-search processes (Treisman & Gelade, 1980) and can be an adequate measure for selective attention (Mason, Humphreys, & Kent, 2003).…”

“…Moreover, these results have been mixed. For example, two studies found that children with ADHD were overall slower and made more errors but did not show differences in RT and accuracy (ACC) as a function of an increased number of distractors (the slope used to assess selective attention) compared to controls (Hazell et al, 1999;Mason et al, 2003). In contrast, some studies using the conjunctive visual-search task did find poorer search performance in children with ADHD compared to comparison controls (Booth et al, 2005;Mullane & Klein, 2008;Shalev & Tsal, 2003;Tsal, Shalev, & Mevorach, 2005).…”

Is the impairment in temporal allocation of visual attention in children with ADHD related to a developmental delay or a structural cognitive deficit?

“…A selective attention deficit corresponds to difficulties in focusing on a relevant target while ignoring irrelevant information. Even though this topic has been hotly debated (for a review, see Wilding, 2005), previous research has indicated that children with ADHD suffer from sustained attention deficits more than they do from spatial selective attention deficits (Booth et al, 2005;Hazell et al, 1999;Karatekin & Asarnow, 1998;Mason, Humphreys, & Kent, 2003;Tsal, Shalev, & Mevorach, 2005;Van der Meere & Sergeant, 1988). Spatial selective attention has been studied through the application of visual search paradigms, in which participants are asked to detect the presence of a target among simultaneously presented distractors (Treisman & Gelade, 1980;Wolfe, 1998).…”