Abstract
Inattention (IA) has been a major problem in children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), accounting for their behavioral and cognitive dysfunctions. However, there are at least three processing steps underlying attentional control for auditory change detection, namely pre-attentive change detection, involuntary attention orienting, and attention reorienting for further evaluation. This study aimed to examine whether children with ADHD would show deficits in any of these subcomponents by using mismatch negativity (MMN), P3a, and late discriminative negativity (LDN) as event-related potential (ERP) markers, under the passive auditory oddball paradigm. Two types of stimuli—pure tones and Mandarin lexical tones—were used to examine if the deficits were general across linguistic and non-linguistic domains. Participants included 15 native Mandarin-speaking children with ADHD and 16 age-matched controls (across groups, age ranged between 6 and 15 years). Two passive auditory oddball paradigms (lexical tones and pure tones) were applied. The pure tone oddball paradigm included a standard stimulus (1000 Hz, 80%) and two deviant stimuli (1015 and 1090 Hz, 10% each). The Mandarin lexical tone oddball paradigm’s standard stimulus was /yi3/ (80%) and two deviant stimuli were /yi1/ and /yi2/ (10% each). The results showed no MMN difference, but did show attenuated P3a and enhanced LDN to the large deviants for both pure and lexical tone changes in the ADHD group. Correlation analysis showed that children with higher ADHD tendency, as indexed by parents’ and teachers’ ratings on ADHD symptoms, showed less positive P3a amplitudes when responding to large lexical tone deviants. Thus, children with ADHD showed impaired auditory change detection for both pure tones and lexical tones in both involuntary attention switching, and attention reorienting for further evaluation. These ERP markers may therefore be used for the evaluation of anti-ADHD drugs that aim to alleviate these dysfunctions.
Highlights
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a neuro developmental disorder, is characterized by symptoms of inattention (IA) and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity apparent and beginning before the age of 12 (American Psychiatric Association, 2013)
The Cluster-Based Permutation Analysis Lexical tone contrasts in the control and ADHD groups The results of the cluster-based permutation analysis for lexical tone are shown in Figure 2, which reveals several significant clusters for large and small deviants in both control and ADHD groups
The ADHD group showed attenuated P3a and enlarged late discriminative negativity (LDN) in detecting large pure tone and lexical tone changes. This suggests that attentional deficits in ADHD are not specific to linguistic or non-linguistic stimuli, and that this is reflected in involuntary attention switch, indexed by P3a, and in attention reorienting for further evaluation, indexed by LDN/reorienting negativity (RON)
Summary
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a neuro developmental disorder, is characterized by symptoms of inattention (IA) and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity apparent and beginning before the age of 12 (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). To be more specific, Abdo et al (2010) found that children with ADHD showed lower performance in the Speech in Noise test, Dichotic listening test, and Frequency Pattern test, when compared to children with dyslexia and age-matched controls. These findings suggest a relationship between poorer performance on auditory processing and IA. The early identification of children with ADHD, thereby allowing early intervention, is an important issue for the prevention of school dysfunction in late childhood and adolescence
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