Abstract
Twenty-five hyperactive boys and 25 controls matched for age, social class, and race were compared on three performance tasks (coding, tone discrimination, and connecting dots) in two settings (nondistracting and highly distracting). Control Ss performed significantly better than did hyperactives in all conditions, except during tone discrimination and connecting dots in the nondistracting setting. Distraction decreased performance for both groups on the coding task and for hyperactives on the tone discrimination task, but significantly improved performance for controls on the connecting dots task. Distraction, where detrimental, was not significantly more so for hyperactives than for controls. The effect of reward on coding performance was studied in the distracting condition; reward produced the best performance for both groups, but significant differences between groups were not found.
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This research was supported in part by U.S. Public Health Service Training Grant (in Biological Sciences) No. MH07081.
The participation of the following people in helping to design this research study and collect data is hereby acknowledged: David Bremer, Ted Goltz, Ruth Rosenthal, and Michael Stern.
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Worland, J., North-Jones, M. & Stern, J.A. Performance and activity of hyperactive and normal boys as a function of distraction and reward. J Abnorm Child Psychol 1, 363–377 (1973). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00917635
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00917635