RESUMEN
The view that Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is associated with a diminished ability to control interference is controversial and based exclusively on results of (verbal)-visual interference tasks, primarily the Stroop Color Word task. The present study compares medication-naïve children with ADHD (n = 35 and n = 51 in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively) with normal controls (n = 26 and n = 32, respectively) on two interference tasks to assess interference control in both the auditory and the visual modality: an Auditory Stroop task and a Simon task. Both groups showed reliable but equal degrees of interference on both tasks, suggesting that children with ADHD do not differ from normal controls in their ability to control interference in either modality.
Asunto(s)
Trastorno por Déficit de Atención con Hiperactividad/diagnóstico , Niño , Manual Diagnóstico y Estadístico de los Trastornos Mentales , Femenino , Humanos , Pruebas del Lenguaje , Masculino , Proyectos Piloto , Pruebas Psicológicas , Tiempo de Reacción , Encuestas y CuestionariosRESUMEN
OBJECTIVE: To determine the potential of inhibitory performance, response speed, and response accuracy and variability, measures central to the conceptualization of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), in distinguishing children with ADHD from healthy controls (HCs). METHOD: The stop signal paradigm was administered to 38 children with ADHD and 31 NCs. The stop signal reaction time (SSRT), mean reaction time (MRT), intraindividual coefficient of variation (ICV), and number of errors were used to predict diagnostic status. RESULTS: Univariate tests showed that the ADHD group performed worse than NCs on all of the dependent variables. Exploratory univariate analyses showed that oppositional defiant disorder comorbidity and ADHD type did not influence results except for the ICV, the effect for this variable (more variability in the ADHD group) being less pronounced for the Predominantly Inattentive type than for the Hyperactive-Impulsive and Combined types. A logistic regression model of the MRT, ICV, and number of errors combined showed best predictive performance, with the MRT contributing the most to group classification (56% of the variance). The final model (MRT, ICV, and number of errors) predicted 87% of the sample in the correct diagnostic category. Operating characteristics showed excellent sensitivity and specificity of 89.5% and 83.9%, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: Our results contrast with theoretical accounts emphasizing inhibitory control as the pivotal measure characterizing cognitive performance in ADHD. Results are discussed in the context of a delay aversion perspective of ADHD.