Fuggetta Giorgio P
Section of Neurological Rehabilitation, Department of Neurological and Visual Sciences, Giambattista Rossi Hospital, University of Verona, Italy.
Child Neuropsychol. 2006 Feb;12(1):1-21. doi: 10.1080/09297040500203418.
The main aim of the present study is to compare the efficiency of executive control processes in 24 boys with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and 58 normal controls of similar age (between 8 and 11 years). Three reaction time (RT) paradigms were utilized: a dual task that requires coordination of two tasks responses, a shift task that makes it necessary to disengage attention from one task and engage into another one, and a stimulus-response spatial compatibility task that requires participants to inhibit a prepotent response. Another purpose of the study is to examine whether Barkley's (1997) executive dysfunction or Sergeant et al.'s (1999) resource allocation/arousal model best account for the behavioral deficits associated with ADHD. Examination of raw RT data showed significantly poorer performance in ADHD children with respect to age-matched controls on both the higher-level cognitive functions of executive control and on lower-level abilities (e.g., speed of processing) of all tasks of this study. However, using proportional transformations of raw RT data, we could demonstrate that, in addition to differences in processing speed, also executive control processes were significantly impaired in children with ADHD.
本研究的主要目的是比较24名患有注意力缺陷/多动障碍（ADHD）的男孩与58名年龄相仿（8至11岁）的正常对照者在执行控制过程中的效率。采用了三种反应时间（RT）范式：一种需要协调两项任务反应的双重任务、一种需要将注意力从一项任务中脱离并转向另一项任务的转换任务，以及一种需要参与者抑制优势反应的刺激-反应空间兼容性任务。该研究的另一个目的是检验巴克利（1997年）的执行功能障碍模型或塞尔让特等人（1999年）的资源分配/唤醒模型是否最能解释与ADHD相关的行为缺陷。对原始RT数据的检查显示，ADHD儿童在本研究所有任务的执行控制高级认知功能以及较低水平能力（如加工速度）方面，相对于年龄匹配的对照组表现明显更差。然而，通过对原始RT数据进行比例转换，我们可以证明，除了加工速度的差异外，ADHD儿童的执行控制过程也受到了显著损害。
