Archival ReportBasic Impairments in Regulating the Speed-Accuracy Tradeoff Predict Symptoms of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder
Section snippets
Participants
Fifty-seven children participated in the study, including 25 children with ADHD. Two control subjects were excluded from the analyses due to poor performance on the task, because more than two-thirds of their choices constituted fast guesses (impulsive choices based on a guess or caused by a distraction). Demographic information is listed in Table S1 in Supplement 1. Subjects with ADHD were matched to typically developing control subjects, for age, Tanner stage, gender, IQ, hand preference, and
Speed-Accuracy Tradeoff
Most subjects had fewer correct choices and faster RTs for speed than accuracy sessions, reflecting the speed-accuracy tradeoff [F(1,53) > 60.7, p < .0001] (Figure 3A). Furthermore, most subjects made more errors and responded more slowly when choices were more difficult [F(1,53) > 21.5, p < .0001]. For RT, there was a group × session interaction, where subjects with ADHD were faster than control subjects on accuracy but not speed sessions [F(1,53) = 8.5, p = .005]. There were no differences
Discussion
We explored basic cognitive processing in ADHD with a perceptual decision-making paradigm. We investigated whether individuals with ADHD were able to balance the speed and accuracy of decisions. We found impairments in this basic regulation that predicted hyperactive and impulsive symptoms.
Interestingly, individuals with ADHD were not impaired on all aspects of task performance (Figure 3): although they showed a preference for speed, they did not make more errors than control subjects in either
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