Can children and adolescents with ADHD use attention to maintain verbal information in working memory?

ABSTRACT: Children and adolescents with attentional-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) present deficits in working memory (WM), but accounts for this phenomenon are still lacking. In this study, we used two variations of a complex-span task to test whether a specific WM mechanism, attentional refreshing, causes these deficits. Attentional refreshing is a maintenance strategy based on the sequential switch of attention between maintaining and processing information in WM. Its use is evidenced by a decrease in recall performance proportional to the distraction of attention away from the memoranda. In this study, we designed two experiments requiring children and adolescents with ADHD symptoms to maintain sequences of letters for subsequent recall, while performing a distracting task. In Experiment

SUBMITTER: Superbia-Guimaraes L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10013902 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature