Weekly Calendar Planning Activity for University Students: Comparison of Individuals With and Without ADHD by Gender.

OBJECTIVE: To introduce a revised version of the Weekly Calendar Planning Activity (WCPA) adapted for university students (Weekly Calendar Performance Activity for students [WCPA-S]) and compare the performance of this activity between students with and without ADHD and across gender groups. METHOD: Participants included a total of 157 students, ages 20 to 30, enrolled in universities/colleges and divided into two groups: students with ADHD (male = 23, female = 38) and without ADHD (male = 33, female = 63). A two-way ANOVA was used for data analyses. The WCPA-S was administered to each student individually. RESULTS: Significant differences were found between students with and without ADHD and across genders in performance, duration of performance, and in the number of strategies used. CONCLUSION: The WCPA-S proved to be an effective performance-based diagnostic tool for the utilization of executive functions in the daily life of university students. This instrument can be used to predict success in higher education and to support learning among university students with ADHD.

Using environmental distractors in the diagnosis of ADHD.

This study examined the effect of the incorporation of environmental distractors in computerized continuous performance test (CPT) on the ability of the test in distinguishing ADHD from non-ADHD children. It was hypothesized that children with ADHD would display more distractibility than controls while performing CPT as measured by omission errors in the presence of pure visual, pure auditory, and a combination of visual and auditory distracting stimuli. Participants were 663 children aged 7-12 years, of them 345 diagnosed with ADHD and 318 without ADHD. Results showed that ADHD children demonstrated more omission errors than their healthy peers in all CPT conditions (no distractors, pure visual or auditory distractors and combined distractors). However, ADHD and non-ADHD children differed in their reaction to distracting stimuli; while all types of distracting stimuli increased the rate of omission errors in ADHD children, only combined visual and auditory distractors increased it in non-ADHD children. Given the low ecological validity of many CPT, these findings suggest that incorporating distractors in CPT improves the ability to distinguish ADHD from non-ADHD children.

Conjunctive Continuous Performance Task (CCPT)--a pure measure of sustained attention.

Among the large variety of attentional tasks that have been used to study sustained attention, the Continuous Performance Task (CPT) is perhaps the most widely used. Despite substantial differences in task characteristics and demands, all CPT paradigms have been referred to as measures of sustained attention. In the present study we introduce a new variant of CPT, which minimizes perceptual and memory components while maximizing the sustained attention components of the task. In addition, we tested the contention that the ability to sustain attention should not be overly dependent on the specific stimuli and task-modality. To this end, we used a new visual Conjunctive CPT (CCPT) developed by Tsal, Shalev, & Mevorach (2005) and its auditory analogue. Using a Multi-Trait-Multi-Method (MTMM) analysis investigating reliability coefficients, convergent validity coefficients and divergent (discriminant) validity coefficients, we established that the new CCPT is a valid measure of sustained attention. In particular, high correlations were obtained between mean RT and SD-RT within each sensory modality. High correlations were also found between performance across sensory modalities (mean convergent validity: .71). Finally, low correlations (mean correlation of .18) were found between performance in the CCPT tasks and performance in two additional visuospatial attention tasks, which do not rely on sustained attention. These findings suggest that independent of sensory modality, the two CCPT tasks used here tap the same stable construct, namely, sustained attention. We conclude that when a measure of sustained attention is required, researchers should be aware of the caveats of standard CPT's and should be careful in selecting a proper task. Moreover, clinicians should appreciate that some CPT measures may reflect a combination of different cognitive operations rather than pure sustained attention.