Hervey Aaron S, Epstein Jeffery N, Curry John F, Tonev Simon, Eugene Arnold L, Keith Conners C, Hinshaw Stephen P, Swanson James M, Hechtman Lily
Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, USA.
Child Neuropsychol. 2006 Apr;12(2):125-40. doi: 10.1080/09297040500499081.
Differences in reaction time (RT) variability have been documented between children with and without Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Most previous research has utilized estimates of normal distributions to examine variability. Using a nontraditional approach, the present study evaluated RT distributions on the Conners' Continuous Performance Test in children and adolescents from the Multimodal Treatment Study of ADHD sample compared to a matched sample of normal controls (n = 65 pairs). The ex-Gaussian curve was used to model RT and RT variability. Children with ADHD demonstrated faster RT associated with the normal portion of the curve and a greater proportion of abnormally slow responses associated with the exponential portion of the curve. These results contradict previous interpretation that children with ADHD have slower than normal responding and demonstrate why slower RT is found when estimates of variability assume normal Gaussian distributions. Further, results of this study suggest that the greater number of abnormally long RTs of children with ADHD reflect attentional lapses on some but not all trials.
患有和未患有注意力缺陷多动障碍（ADHD）的儿童在反应时间（RT）变异性方面存在差异已被记录在案。以往大多数研究都利用正态分布估计来检验变异性。本研究采用非传统方法，对多动症多模式治疗研究样本中的儿童和青少年进行了康纳斯连续操作测验的RT分布评估，并与匹配的正常对照组样本（n = 65对）进行了比较。采用前高斯曲线对RT和RT变异性进行建模。患有ADHD的儿童在曲线的正常部分表现出更快的RT，而在曲线的指数部分表现出更大比例的异常缓慢反应。这些结果与之前关于患有ADHD的儿童反应比正常儿童慢的解释相矛盾，并说明了为什么在变异性估计假设为正态高斯分布时会发现RT较慢。此外，本研究结果表明，患有ADHD的儿童中异常长RT的数量较多反映了部分而非所有试验中的注意力不集中。
