The speed of visual attention and motor-response decisions in Adult Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder
Cross-Villasana, F. and Finke, K. and Hennig-Fast, K. and Kilian, B. and Wiegand, I. and Muller, Hermann J. and Möller, H.-J. and Töllner, T. (2015) The speed of visual attention and motor-response decisions in Adult Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. Biological Psychiatry 78 (2), pp. 107-115. ISSN 0006-3223.
Abstract
Background: Adults with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) exhibit slowed reaction times (RTs) in various attention tasks. The exact origins of this slowing, however, have not been yet established. Potential candidates are early sensory processes mediating the deployment of focal-attention, stimulus-response translation processes deciding upon the appropriate motor-response, and motor processes generating the response. Methods: We combined mental chronometry (RT) measures of adult ADHD (n = 15) and healthy control (n = 15) participants with their lateralized event-related potentials (ERP) during the performance of a visual-search task to differentiate potential sources of slowing at separable levels of processing: the posterior contralateral negativity (PCN) was used to index focal-attentional selection times, while the lateralized readiness potentials synchronized to stimulus (sLRP) and response events (rLRP) were used to index the times taken for response selection and production, respectively. To assess the clinical relevance of ERPs, a correlation analysis between neural measures and subjective current and retrospective ADHD symptom ratings was performed. Results: ADHD patients exhibited slower RTs than control participants, which were accompanied by prolonged PCN and sLRP, but not rLRP, latencies. Moreover, the PCN timing was positively correlated with ADHD symptom ratings. Conclusions: The behavioral RT slowing of adult ADHD patients was based on a summation of internal processing delays arising at perceptual and response-selection stages; motor-response production, by contrast, was not impaired. The correlation between PCN times and ADHD symptom ratings suggests that this brain signal may serve as a potential candidate for a neurocognitive endophenotype of ADHD.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | ADHD, decision-making, stimulus-response translation, electroencephalography, psychophysics, neuro-cognitive endophenotypes |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences |
| Depositing User: | Administrator |
| Date Deposited: | 11 Feb 2015 12:38 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 17:15 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/11605 |
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