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Conditional Learning Deficits in Children with ADHD can be Reduced Through Reward Optimization and Response-Specific Reinforcement

When children with ADHD are presented with behavioral choices, they struggle more than Typically Developing [TD] children to take into account contextual information necessary for making adaptive choices. The challenge presented by this type of behavioral decision making can be operationalized as a...

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Autores principales: De Meyer, Hasse, Tripp, Gail, Beckers, Tom, van der Oord, Saskia
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer US 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8322018/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33792820
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10802-021-00781-5
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author De Meyer, Hasse
Tripp, Gail
Beckers, Tom
van der Oord, Saskia
author_facet De Meyer, Hasse
Tripp, Gail
Beckers, Tom
van der Oord, Saskia
author_sort De Meyer, Hasse
collection PubMed
description When children with ADHD are presented with behavioral choices, they struggle more than Typically Developing [TD] children to take into account contextual information necessary for making adaptive choices. The challenge presented by this type of behavioral decision making can be operationalized as a Conditional Discrimination Learning [CDL] task. We previously showed that CDL is impaired in children with ADHD. The present study explores whether this impairment can be remediated by increasing reward for correct responding or by reinforcing correct conditional choice behavior with situationally specific outcomes (Differential Outcomes). An arbitrary Delayed Matching-To-Sample [aDMTS] procedure was used, in which children had to learn to select the correct response given the sample stimulus presented (CDL). We compared children with ADHD (N = 45) and TD children (N = 49) on a baseline aDMTS task and sequentially adapted the aDMTS task so that correct choice behavior was rewarded with a more potent reinforcer (reward manipulation) or with sample-specific (and hence response-specific) reinforcers (Differential Outcomes manipulation). At baseline, children with ADHD performed significantly worse than TD children. Both manipulations (reward optimization and Differential Outcomes) improved performance in the ADHD group, resulting in a similar level of performance to the TD group. Increasing the reward value or the response-specificity of reinforcement enhances Conditional Discrimination Learning in children with ADHD. These behavioral techniques may be effective in promoting the learning of adaptive behavioral choices in children with ADHD.
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spelling pubmed-83220182021-08-19 Conditional Learning Deficits in Children with ADHD can be Reduced Through Reward Optimization and Response-Specific Reinforcement De Meyer, Hasse Tripp, Gail Beckers, Tom van der Oord, Saskia Res Child Adolesc Psychopathol Article When children with ADHD are presented with behavioral choices, they struggle more than Typically Developing [TD] children to take into account contextual information necessary for making adaptive choices. The challenge presented by this type of behavioral decision making can be operationalized as a Conditional Discrimination Learning [CDL] task. We previously showed that CDL is impaired in children with ADHD. The present study explores whether this impairment can be remediated by increasing reward for correct responding or by reinforcing correct conditional choice behavior with situationally specific outcomes (Differential Outcomes). An arbitrary Delayed Matching-To-Sample [aDMTS] procedure was used, in which children had to learn to select the correct response given the sample stimulus presented (CDL). We compared children with ADHD (N = 45) and TD children (N = 49) on a baseline aDMTS task and sequentially adapted the aDMTS task so that correct choice behavior was rewarded with a more potent reinforcer (reward manipulation) or with sample-specific (and hence response-specific) reinforcers (Differential Outcomes manipulation). At baseline, children with ADHD performed significantly worse than TD children. Both manipulations (reward optimization and Differential Outcomes) improved performance in the ADHD group, resulting in a similar level of performance to the TD group. Increasing the reward value or the response-specificity of reinforcement enhances Conditional Discrimination Learning in children with ADHD. These behavioral techniques may be effective in promoting the learning of adaptive behavioral choices in children with ADHD. Springer US 2021-04-01 2021 /pmc/articles/PMC8322018/ /pubmed/33792820 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10802-021-00781-5 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Article
De Meyer, Hasse
Tripp, Gail
Beckers, Tom
van der Oord, Saskia
Conditional Learning Deficits in Children with ADHD can be Reduced Through Reward Optimization and Response-Specific Reinforcement
title Conditional Learning Deficits in Children with ADHD can be Reduced Through Reward Optimization and Response-Specific Reinforcement
title_full Conditional Learning Deficits in Children with ADHD can be Reduced Through Reward Optimization and Response-Specific Reinforcement
title_fullStr Conditional Learning Deficits in Children with ADHD can be Reduced Through Reward Optimization and Response-Specific Reinforcement
title_full_unstemmed Conditional Learning Deficits in Children with ADHD can be Reduced Through Reward Optimization and Response-Specific Reinforcement
title_short Conditional Learning Deficits in Children with ADHD can be Reduced Through Reward Optimization and Response-Specific Reinforcement
title_sort conditional learning deficits in children with adhd can be reduced through reward optimization and response-specific reinforcement
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8322018/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33792820
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10802-021-00781-5
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