Abstract
Educators have observed and suggested that an appropriate seating arrangement is vital for the classroom performance of children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (CADHD). The current study attempts to find a cognitive reason for this observation by exploring whether CADHD are distracted by classroom noises from different locations. The current study attempts to create an experimental setting, which is on the one hand intuitively related to the classroom situation, while also maintaining experimental control, exploring the causal relation and using a task which does not require excessive attentional resources to focus on the impact of distracters rather than on task difficulty. We explored whether CADHD are more vulnerable to auditory distracters from different locations even if an attended task does not demand excessive executive resources. CADHD and normal children verbally repeated auditorily presented familiar words. Auditorily presented random numbers from the front, left, or right of the participants were presented randomly as distracters. The results showed that the effect of distracter on error rate was significant as was the interaction effect of distracter and group. However, only distracters from the front led to significantly more errors for CADHD. The findings suggest that CADHD are vulnerable to distracters from the auditory modality even when they have to perform a simple auditory task such as repeating familiar words – in a situation intuitively akin to the classroom setting.
Highlights
Educators have stressed the importance of classroom seating arrangements for improving the performance of children with ADHD (CADHD)
We explored whether CADHD are more vulnerable to auditory distracters from different locations even if an attended task does not demand excessive executive resources
A two factor (2x4) mixed model analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to assess the effects of condition (ADHD versus non-ADHD) and location of the distracter in terms of differences in mean scores; post hoc analysis was conducted to test for differences in performance between conditions
Summary
Educators have stressed the importance of classroom seating arrangements for improving the performance of children with ADHD (CADHD). Carbone [1] suggested that CADHD should be seated at the front row to minimise distractions from other children. Experimental studies have consistently demonstrated that CADHD are worse than normal control groups on neurological tests assessing sustained attention It has been demonstrated that CADHD are highly distractible by visual distracters when they have to sustain their attention to perform a specific task ([4], [5]). Reference [7] found effect of novel sounds as distracters, which slowed down attended visual tasks. Bedi, Halperin and Sharma [8] examined the normal population and reported that auditory distracters did not significantly correlate to sustained attention scores
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