Central and marginal change detection task performance in ADHD children

Change detection (CD) accuracy, which is associated to visual attention and memory, was studied in children with ADHD. CD accuracy is lower in children with ADHD compared to typically developing children (TD). The main aim of this study is to evaluate change detection task of different ADHD groups and to compare their performances with TD children. More in deeper for this purpose we evaluated if the performance related to the levels of interest (central/marginal level of interest) and the different types of change (color and location and presence/absence change) were impaired in ADHD. 56 children (mean age ADHD-C = 11.31 (DS=1.07), n= 16), (mean age ADHD-I = 10.67 (DS= 1.15), n= 12) and (mean age TD = 11.12 (DS= 1.33), n=28) participated to the study. Flicker paradigm was used to evaluate change detection performance in all conditions. A multivariate repeated measure design of research was applied: 3 (groups: ADHD-C, ADHD-I, TD) X 2 (levels of interest: central and marginal) X 3 (type of change: color, location and absence of change). Change detection accuracies were measured. A multivariate repeated measure analysis of variance was applied, stating the level of significance at .01. Results of TD children were higher compared to ADHD children. The marginal level of interest was worse in both ADHD groups than TD. Position but not color type of change was worse in both the ADHD groups compared to TD group. The change detection performance was found to be worse in ADHD children than TD children. Since the results showed that CDT performance was lower in ADHD only with reference to the marginal level of interest and the location type of change, the findings could be related to the difficulty to sustain attention in ADHD children and their deficient mechanism of attention shifting in detailed aspects of the tasks.