Title

Adhd And Behavioral Inhibition: A Re-Examination Of The Stop-Signal Task

Keywords

ADHD; Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder; Behavioral inhibition; Stop-signal task

Abstract

The current study investigates two recently identified threats to the construct validity of behavioral inhibition as a core deficit of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) based on the stop-signal task: calculation of mean reaction time from go-trials presented adjacent to intermittent stop-trials, and non-reporting of the stop-signal delay metric. Children with ADHD (n=12) and typically developing (TD) children (n=11) were administered the standard stop-signal task and three variant stop-signal conditions. These included a no-tone condition administered without the presentation of an auditory tone; an ignore-tone condition that presented a neutral (i.e., not associated with stopping) auditory tone; and a second ignore-tone condition that presented a neutral auditory tone after the tone had been previously paired with stopping. Children with ADHD exhibited significantly slower and more variable reaction times to go-stimuli, and slower stop-signal reaction times relative to TD controls. Stop-signal delay was not significantly different between groups, and both groups' go-trial reaction times slowed following meaningful tones. Collectively, these findings corroborate recent meta-analyses and indicate that previous findings of stop-signal performance deficits in ADHD reflect slower and more variable responding to visually presented stimuli and concurrent processing of a second stimulus, rather than deficits of motor behavioral inhibition. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.

Publication Date

10-1-2008

Publication Title

Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology

Volume

36

Issue

7

Number of Pages

989-998

Document Type

Article

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-008-9230-z

Socpus ID

52449086676 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/52449086676

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