Lower Attentional Skills predict increased exploratory foraging patterns

Charlotte Van Den Driessche,Jérôme Sackur,Françoise Chevrier,Axel Cleeremans

doi:10.1038/s41598-019-46761-0

Abstract

When engaged in a search task, one needs to arbitrate between exploring and exploiting the environment to optimize the outcome. Many intrinsic, task and environmental factors are known to influence the exploration/exploitation balance. Here, in a non clinical population, we show that the level of inattention (assessed as a trait) is one such factor: children with higher scores on an ADHD (Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) questionnaire exhibited longer transitions between consecutively retrieved items, in both a visual and a semantic search task. These more frequent exploration behaviours were associated with differential performance patterns: children with higher levels of ADHD traits performed better in semantic search, while their performance was unaffected in visual search. Our results contribute to the growing literature suggesting that ADHD should not be simply conceived as a pure deficit of attention, but also as a specific cognitive strategy that may prove beneficial in some contexts.

Highlights

Searching for definite items in a rich environment is a fundamental behaviour in most animal species
Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and especially the hyperactive subtype is associated with extreme novelty seeking[22], and genes implicated in the dopaminergic pathways, associated with ADHD23 (DRD4 allele variants, see Hawi et al, 2003 for a review) are more frequent in populations that have a history of migration[24]
By means of bootstrapping (N = 100), with a cluster-based significance level of 0.05, we found that the two groups differed from the quantile 0.56 to the quantile 0.99, with participants high on the ADHD-rs having, again, an excess of long distances compared to participants low on the scale

Summary

Introduction

Searching for definite items in a rich environment is a fundamental behaviour in most animal species. Unrelated activities (such as foraging in the wild or looking for relevant references to include in a bibliography), all share an underlying structure: one has to navigate a predefined space so as to find items that match a definite category Interest for this analogy is not recent in psychology and William James wrote in his Principles of Psychology[1] Studies have shown a correlation between the number of regions visited when free-viewing a visual scene with curiosity as a personality trait[26] and ADHD27 Together, this suggests that attention deficits in ADHD would co-vary with a bias towards exploration in the regulation of the exploration/exploitation trade-off, and explain some behavioural patterns of activity found in ADHD. We predicted that children with higher scores on the ADHD-rs should produce more long distance ‘jumps’ between consecutive items, as a consequence of more explorative traits (see Fig. 1)

Methods

Results

Conclusion