ABSTRACT

Children with attentional-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have impairments in working memory (WM) functioning. Impaired orienting of visual attention during encoding and/or maintenance is hypothesized as the cause of poor performance in visuospatial WM in 10-to-16-year-olds. We used a color-recognition task with valid location cues before encoding (pre-cues) and during maintenance (retro-cues). If ADHD children have an orienting deficit during these processing stages, they should not benefit from the cues. We observed strong pre- and retro-cueing benefits both for ADHD and typically developing controls, with no differences between the groups. This strengthens findings showing that ADHD is not characterized by deficits in orienting attention and provides evidence of retro-cue benefits in this population.

摘要

注意力缺陷/多动障碍 (ADHD) 儿童的工作记忆 (WM) 功能受损。编码和/或维护期间视觉注意定向受损被假设为 10 至 16 岁儿童视觉空间 WM 表现不佳的原因。我们在编码之前（预提示）和维护期间（逆向提示）使用了具有有效位置提示的颜色识别任务。如果 ADHD 儿童在这些处理阶段存在定向障碍，则他们不应从这些提示中获益。我们观察到对 ADHD 和典型的发育控制都有很强的前提示和后提示益处，两组之间没有差异。这加强了表明 ADHD 的特征不是注意力定向缺陷的发现，并提供了逆向提示对这一人群有益的证据。