Abstract
Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are prone to peer rejection and disliking due to difficulties in social perception and interaction. To address social perception impairments in ADHD, we examined children with ADHD in a noisy biological motion (BM) direction discrimination paradigm in association with sociocognitive factors including emotion regulation, theory of mind (TOM), and working memory compared to healthy controls. Our results showed that children with ADHD were poorer in discriminating BM direction in noisy environments (F (1, 36) = 4.655, p=0.038). Moreover, a significant correlation was found between working memory and TOM with BM discrimination in an ADHD group (r = 0.442, p=0.01, and r = 0.403, p=0.05, respectively). Our findings could suggest that social perception in noisy scenarios may be affected by memory and social cognitive abilities of children with ADHD.
Highlights
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is characterized by multiple deficits in cognitive, behavioral, and psychological domains including emotion regulation, working memory, and higher-order social cognitive processing, such as theory of mind (TOM) [1,2,3]. social cognition impairment is not accounted as a diagnostic criterion for ADHD [4], impairment in social relationship, peer relationships, is a prominent and inherent feature in children with ADHD [5, 6]
; we aimed to explore the association between biological motion (BM) performance and the mentioned triad of cognitive factors in order to provide supplemental information about the underlying sociocognitive mechanisms involved in social difficulties in children with ADHD
We examined the difference in mean scores of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) between ADHD and normal groups (10.47 (4.61) and 16.47 (1.89), respectively). e results represented significant difference in the mean of correct responses in the RMET between two groups (t (36) −5.24, p 0.01)
Summary
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is characterized by multiple deficits in cognitive, behavioral, and psychological domains including emotion regulation (e.g., impulsivity), working memory, and higher-order social cognitive processing, such as theory of mind (TOM) [1,2,3]. social cognition impairment is not accounted as a diagnostic criterion for ADHD [4], impairment in social relationship, peer relationships, is a prominent and inherent feature in children with ADHD [5, 6]. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is characterized by multiple deficits in cognitive, behavioral, and psychological domains including emotion regulation (e.g., impulsivity), working memory, and higher-order social cognitive processing, such as theory of mind (TOM) [1,2,3]. Due to the important role of visual processing of body movements or biological motions (BMs) in a dynamic social world [10], in the current study, we administered a method introduced by Johansson for investigating BM perception of children with ADHD [11]. The ability of humans to extract accurate perceptual information based solely on a human body movement is defined as a hallmark of social cognition and has an immense value for successful and adaptive social behavior as well as nonverbal communication [12].
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