Abstract
Attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is closely associated with deficits in cognitive control. It seems, however, that the degree of deficits strongly depends on the examined subprocess, with the resolution of stimulus–stimulus conflicts being particularly difficult for patients with ADHD. The picture is far less clear regarding stimulus–response conflicts. The current study provides multi-level behavioural and neurophysiological data on this type of conflict monitoring in children with ADHD compared to healthy controls. To account for the potentially strong effects of intra-individual variability, electroencephalogram (EEG) signal decomposition methods were used to analyze the data. Crucially, none of the analyses (behavioural, event-related potentials, or decomposed EEG data) show any differences between the ADHD group and the control group. Bayes statistical analysis confirmed the high likelihood of the null hypothesis being true in all cases. Thus, the data provide multi-level evidence showing that conflict monitoring processes are indeed partly intact in ADHD, even when eliminating possible biasing factors such as intra-individual variability. While stimulus–stimulus conflict processing has been shown to be consistently dysfunctional in ADHD, the resolution of stimulus–response conflicts is not deficient in this patient group. In comparison to other studies, the results provide novel theoretical insights into the nature of conflict control deficits in childhood ADHD.
Highlights
Attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most prevalent psychiatric disorders in adolescence and is associated with several deficits in executive functioning and cognitive control [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
ADHD symptom severity was not correlated with task performance
We examined conflict monitoring processes in patients with ADHD using a Flanker task and neurophysiological methods
Summary
Attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most prevalent psychiatric disorders in adolescence and is associated with several deficits in executive functioning and cognitive control [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. Recent data suggest that treatment approaches in ADHD have very specific effects on distinguishable neurophysiological codes associated with cognitive control [17] All of this already shows that it is necessary to gain more detailed insights into the neurophysiological subprocesses and coding levels underlying different facets of cognitive control in ADHD and to go beyond the commonly examined EEG-parameters for this. It is the goal of the current study to examine modulations of neurophysiological processes underlying the resolution of S-R conflicts in ADHD in detail and to account for possible biasing effects of intra-individual variability in the neurophysiological data. This study uses both classical significance tests and Bayes’ statistics to estimate the degree of evidence for the null hypothesis
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