Abstract
Recent evidence shows a novel role for eye vergence in orienting attention in adult subjects. Here we investigated whether such modulation in eye vergence by attention is present in children and whether it is altered in children with ADHD compared to control subjects. We therefore measured the angle of eye vergence in children previously diagnosed with ADHD while performing a cue task and compared the results to those from age-matched controls. We observed a strong modulation in the angle of vergence in the control group and a weak modulation in the ADHD group. In addition, in the control group the modulation in eye vergence was different between the informative cue and uninformative cue condition. This difference was less noticeable in the ADHD group. Our study supports the observation of deficient binocular vision in ADHD children. We argue that the observed disruption in vergence modulation in ADHD children is manifest of altered cognitive processing of sensory information. Our work may provide new insights into attention disorders, like ADHD.
Highlights
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common neurodevelopmental disorders affecting an estimated 3 to 7% of school-aged children worldwide
Twenty-nine children diagnosed with ADHD, aged between 7 and 14 years, and a similar number of sex/age matched healthy children participated in the experiment
No differences in reaction times were observed between the control and ADHD group
Summary
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common neurodevelopmental disorders affecting an estimated 3 to 7% of school-aged children worldwide. It is characterized by a low degree of attention, a high degree of hyperactivity and impulsivity, and the inability to inhibit inappropriate actions. Several studies show that subjects with attention disorders like ADHD show atypical oculomotor behavior. Compared to controls ADHD patients show an increased variability of saccadic responses [1,2]. Increased variability in ADHD patients has been observed in anti-saccades [1], visually guided saccades [1,3,4], and memory guided saccades [5]. Recent studies found that micro-saccades, rather than being randomly distributed, had directions that were directly correlated with the directions of covert attention shifts [6] and that the average rate of micro-saccades modulated (both suppression and enhancement) after cue presentation
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