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Impairment in Attention Focus During the Posner Cognitive Task in Children With ADHD: An Eye Tracker Study

Attention is a major cognitive function that allows the individuals to focus selectively on a discrete stimulus while ignoring others. Visual information could be driven endogenously, when the goals or desires are voluntary, or exogenously, in response to salient visual events in the environment. Si...

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Autores principales: Caldani, Simona, Isel, Frederic, Septier, Mathilde, Acquaviva, Eric, Delorme, Richard, Bucci, Maria Pia
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7492658/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32984203
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fped.2020.00484
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author Caldani, Simona
Isel, Frederic
Septier, Mathilde
Acquaviva, Eric
Delorme, Richard
Bucci, Maria Pia
author_facet Caldani, Simona
Isel, Frederic
Septier, Mathilde
Acquaviva, Eric
Delorme, Richard
Bucci, Maria Pia
author_sort Caldani, Simona
collection PubMed
description Attention is a major cognitive function that allows the individuals to focus selectively on a discrete stimulus while ignoring others. Visual information could be driven endogenously, when the goals or desires are voluntary, or exogenously, in response to salient visual events in the environment. Since subjects with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) show heightened distractibility during activities that require significant attentional engagement, we hypothesized that they may be more severely impaired in their ability to perform endogenous tasks than controls. To elicit endogenous and exogenous shifts of attention, we thus used a modified version of Posner's cueing task. We compared oculomotor performance measured by an eye tracker in a group of 31 children with ADHD (mean age = 9.1 ± 1.3 years) and age-, sex-, and IQ-matched typically developing children. Endogenous and exogenous conditions were explored in three distinct visual sub-conditions (valid, invalid, and neutral). We found that children with ADHD showed longer latency during endogenous conditions compared to TD children in invalid sub-conditions. They also performed more errors than controls, during the endogenous task in neutral sub-conditions and during exogenous task in neutral and invalid sub-conditions. Our study suggests that children with ADHD may allocate their attention resource toward the detection of exogenous targets with a deficit in their ability to perform endogenous task. We suggest also that they have a difficulty in the engagement of the inhibitory control system particularly during voluntary saccade performance. This could result from impaired interactions between the ventral and dorsal attention networks as well as in the frontal eye field, although neuroimaging studies are necessary to validate this hypothesis in the ADHD population.
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spelling pubmed-74926582020-09-25 Impairment in Attention Focus During the Posner Cognitive Task in Children With ADHD: An Eye Tracker Study Caldani, Simona Isel, Frederic Septier, Mathilde Acquaviva, Eric Delorme, Richard Bucci, Maria Pia Front Pediatr Pediatrics Attention is a major cognitive function that allows the individuals to focus selectively on a discrete stimulus while ignoring others. Visual information could be driven endogenously, when the goals or desires are voluntary, or exogenously, in response to salient visual events in the environment. Since subjects with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) show heightened distractibility during activities that require significant attentional engagement, we hypothesized that they may be more severely impaired in their ability to perform endogenous tasks than controls. To elicit endogenous and exogenous shifts of attention, we thus used a modified version of Posner's cueing task. We compared oculomotor performance measured by an eye tracker in a group of 31 children with ADHD (mean age = 9.1 ± 1.3 years) and age-, sex-, and IQ-matched typically developing children. Endogenous and exogenous conditions were explored in three distinct visual sub-conditions (valid, invalid, and neutral). We found that children with ADHD showed longer latency during endogenous conditions compared to TD children in invalid sub-conditions. They also performed more errors than controls, during the endogenous task in neutral sub-conditions and during exogenous task in neutral and invalid sub-conditions. Our study suggests that children with ADHD may allocate their attention resource toward the detection of exogenous targets with a deficit in their ability to perform endogenous task. We suggest also that they have a difficulty in the engagement of the inhibitory control system particularly during voluntary saccade performance. This could result from impaired interactions between the ventral and dorsal attention networks as well as in the frontal eye field, although neuroimaging studies are necessary to validate this hypothesis in the ADHD population. Frontiers Media S.A. 2020-09-02 /pmc/articles/PMC7492658/ /pubmed/32984203 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fped.2020.00484 Text en Copyright © 2020 Caldani, Isel, Septier, Acquaviva, Delorme and Bucci. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Pediatrics
Caldani, Simona
Isel, Frederic
Septier, Mathilde
Acquaviva, Eric
Delorme, Richard
Bucci, Maria Pia
Impairment in Attention Focus During the Posner Cognitive Task in Children With ADHD: An Eye Tracker Study
title Impairment in Attention Focus During the Posner Cognitive Task in Children With ADHD: An Eye Tracker Study
title_full Impairment in Attention Focus During the Posner Cognitive Task in Children With ADHD: An Eye Tracker Study
title_fullStr Impairment in Attention Focus During the Posner Cognitive Task in Children With ADHD: An Eye Tracker Study
title_full_unstemmed Impairment in Attention Focus During the Posner Cognitive Task in Children With ADHD: An Eye Tracker Study
title_short Impairment in Attention Focus During the Posner Cognitive Task in Children With ADHD: An Eye Tracker Study
title_sort impairment in attention focus during the posner cognitive task in children with adhd: an eye tracker study
topic Pediatrics
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7492658/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32984203
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fped.2020.00484
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