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European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
Published in: European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry 8/2014

01-08-2014 | Original Contribution

Impaired reflexive orienting to social cues in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

Authors: Andrea Marotta, Maria Casagrande, Caterina Rosa, Lisa Maccari, Bianca Berloco, Augusto Pasini

Published in: European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry | Issue 8/2014

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Abstract

The present study investigated whether another person’s social attention, specifically the direction of their eye gaze, and non-social directional cues triggered reflexive orienting in individuals with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and age-matched controls. A choice reaction time and a detection tasks were used in which eye gaze, arrow and peripheral cues correctly (congruent) or incorrectly (incongruent) signalled target location. Independently of the type of the task, differences between groups were specific to the cue condition. Typically developing individuals shifted attention to the location cued by both social and non-social cues, whereas ADHD group showed evidence of reflexive orienting only to locations previously cued by non-social stimuli (arrow and peripheral cues) but failed to show such orienting effect in response to social eye gaze cues. The absence of reflexive orienting effect for eye gaze cues observed in the participants with ADHD may reflect an attentional impairment in responding to socially relevant information.
Footnotes
1
There are evidences to suggest that the differences in the effects of peripheral and central cues (e.g. arrow and eye-gaze) are largely independent of the stimulus parameters such as stimulus size and contrast [30] in healthy participants. However, the impact of the different stimulus parameters have never directly compared in ADHD. Further research will be necessary to shed light upon this issue.
 
2
The lack of eye-gaze cueing effect found in ADHD participants could alternatively be attributed to a greater ability to control the extent that gaze information influences the performance. While further research is necessary to shed light upon this issue, the fact that several studies have reported impairments in executive control in individuals with ADHD [29, 38, 42, 64] makes unlikely that they are engaged in more effective controlled processing when eye-gaze is used as a distracting stimulus.
 
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Metadata
Title
Impaired reflexive orienting to social cues in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
Authors
Andrea Marotta
Maria Casagrande
Caterina Rosa
Lisa Maccari
Bianca Berloco
Augusto Pasini
Publication date
01-08-2014
Publisher
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Published in
European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry / Issue 8/2014
Print ISSN: 1018-8827
Electronic ISSN: 1435-165X
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00787-013-0505-8

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