Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging
Archival ReportMemory for Action Rules and Reaction Time Variability in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were 56 college students (Table 1), either with ADHD or with no clinical disorder. Participants with ADHD were asked to provide a history of ADHD diagnosis performed by a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist. The diagnosis was confirmed with a structured clinical interview for DSM-IV, including confirmation of the diagnosis with collateral contact when available. Participants completed a computerized version of the Conners’ Adult ADHD Rating Scales (58) to measure symptom severity,
Choice Task Performance
Ex-Gaussian parameters were estimated for each participant, at each condition. Repeated measures analyses of variance were performed separately for each ex-Gaussian parameter (µ, σ, τ) as dependent variables, with mapping (arbitrary or nonarbitrary), set size (two-choice or six-choice), task type (letters, digits, or shapes), and group (ADHD vs. HC) as independent variables (Figure 3; Supplement 1).
Discussion
The present study sought to explore the distinct contributions of perceptual processing and WM retrieval processes to increased RT variability in ADHD. Two groups of college undergraduates (subjects with ADHD vs. HC subjects) performed a battery of choice RT tasks under low and high WM load conditions. WM load was manipulated by means of set size (two-choice vs. six-choice) and mapping (arbitrary vs. nonarbitrary), with WM demands assumed to increase with the number of arbitrary rules.
Acknowledgments and Disclosures
This work was supported by the Israel Science Foundation Grant No. 1939/12 (to NM) and Fulbright Scholar Program (to ART).
We thank Gal Eblagon, Danielle Dotan, Ayala Barak, Sonia Rogachev, Shir Bekhor, and Eyal Eilat for their help in running the experiments.
The authors report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.
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