Abstract
Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is frequently characterized as a disorder of executive function (EF). However, behavioral tests of EF, such as go/No-go tasks, often fail to grasp the deficiency in EF revealed by questionnaire-based measures. This inability is usually attributed to questionnaires and behavioral tasks assessing different constructs of EFs. We propose an additional explanation for this discrepancy. We hypothesize that this problem stems from the lack of dynamic assessment of decision-making (e.g., continuous monitoring of motor behavior such as velocity and acceleration in choice reaching) in classical versions of behavioral tasks. We test this hypothesis by introducing dynamic assessment in the form of mouse motion in a go/No-go task. Our results indicate that, among healthy college students, self-report measures of ADHD symptoms become strongly associated with performance in behavioral tasks when continuous assessment (e.g., acceleration in the mouse-cursor motion) is introduced.
Highlights
Impulsivity—deficiency in behavioral inhibition (Barkley, 1997; Alderson et al, 2012)—is a key characteristic of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
We investigated the extent to which performance measures such as response time, accuracy, and mouse-specific measures are associated with Conners Adult ADHD rating scale (Conners et al, 1999b)
To illustrate the role of response variability and compare the predictive power of variability in keypress and mouse measures, we investigated the correlations between variability coefficients in both conditions and CAARS scores
Summary
Impulsivity—deficiency in behavioral inhibition (Barkley, 1997; Alderson et al, 2012)—is a key characteristic of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). It affects many facets of decisionmaking processes in young children (Geurts et al, 2006) as well as adults (Mäntylä et al, 2012). Only a miniscule correlation was observed between performance-based tests’ results and rating scales (Toplak et al, 2013) or occupational functioning measurements such as the frequency of conflicts at work or job terminations (Barkley and Murphy, 2010). Five (19%) of reported correlations between performance-based measures of disinhibition were significantly correlated with rating-based measures of disinhibition
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