ADHD in Children
Visual Abstract
Mean response times, variability, and skew in the responding of ADHD children: a response time distributional approach
ADHD and Response Time
C Leth-Steensen , Z K Elbaz, V I Douglas
Summarized by:
May 26, 2023
study source
Acta Psychol (Amst)
May 2000
🔎
What they studied
Researchers wanted to examine weather ADHD affects how quickly we respond to questions.
💡
What they found
Boys with ADHD took longer to respond, on average. This was driven by a few very long response times.
👩⚕️
What this means
While boys with ADHD may be just as capable of responding quickly as those without ADHD, their average response times are affected by potential lapses of attention.
Mean response times, variability, and skew in the responding of ADHD children: a response time distributional approach
While ADHD is defined by attention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity symptoms, researchers have increasingly linked ADHD with other symptoms in cognition.
This study wanted to see if ADHD affects our response time. For example, when given a cognitive challenge or test, do those with ADHD take longer to provide an answer?
Methods
Researchers compared 17 boys with ADHD and 17 similar boys without ADHD. They performed cognitive testing to measure how quickly the two groups responded to see whether those with ADHD took longer to respond.
What is a case control study
Study Quote
Response time (RT) distributions from three fixed foreperiod conditions (2, 4, and 8 s) in a warned four-choice RT task were obtained for a group of boys with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, combined type (ADHD; n = 17) and for two groups of normal control boys (age-matched, n ...
Show More
Results
The results showed that those with ADHD took significantly longer to respond to questions on average.
They also had a wider range of response times compared to those without ADHD.
When the researchers looked closer at the data, they found that most of the differences were because of a few very long response times for those with ADHD. Some experts refer to this as a long tail.
This means that those with ADHD are generally capable of response times just as fast as those without ADHD. But, they may experience the occasional delayed response, potentially due to lapses in attention or focus, that caused them to have a lower average response time.
“
The ADHD responding can be differentiated from the age-matched control responding almost exclusively in terms of the size of the tails of their respective response time distributions (i.e., in the value of s). In essence, the faster correct responses of the ADHD boys are almost as fast as those of the age-matched control boys, whereas the slower ADHD responses are much slower.
In a separate analysis of data from younger boys, researchers found that typically younger boys without ADHD have a wider range of response times.
“
Although the response time distributions of these two groups of boys are both highly positively skewed (i.e., are characterized by large values of s), these distributional data also indicate that the responding of the younger control boys, unlike the ADHD re- sponding, is further marked by both an overall slowing and spreading out of the entire ensemble of response times
Study Quote
Statistical results indicate that the ADHD distributions differ from the age-matched control distributions with respect to the size of the tail (larger for the ADHD boys), but differ from the younger control distributions with respect to the location of the leading edge (slower for the y...
Show More
This research is consistent with previous studies that have linked ADHD with slower reaction times: