Masunami Taiji, Okazaki Shinji, Maekawa Hisao
Comprehensive Human Sciences (Disability Science), University of Tsukuba, 1-1-1 Tennodai, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8572, Japan.
Int J Psychophysiol. 2009 Jun;72(3):283-8. doi: 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2009.01.007.
Earlier studies have demonstrated that attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with aberrant sensitivity to rewards and punishments. Although some studies have focused on real-life decision making in children with ADHD using the Iowa gambling task, the number of good deck choices, a frequently used index of decision-making ability in the gambling task, is insufficient for investigating the complex decision-making strategies in subjects. In the present study, we investigated decision-making strategies in ADHD children, analyzing T-patterns with rewards, with punishments, and without rewards and punishments during the gambling task, and examined the relationship between decision-making strategies and skin conductance responses (SCRs) to rewards and punishments. We hypothesized that ADHD children and normal children would employ different decision-making strategies depending on their sensitivity to rewards and punishments in the gambling task. Our results revealed that ADHD children had fewer T-patterns with punishments and exhibited a significant tendency to have many T-patterns with rewards, thus supporting our hypothesis. Moreover, in contrast to normal children, ADHD children failed to demonstrate differences between reward and punishment SCRs, supporting the idea that they had an aberrant sensitivity to rewards and punishments. Therefore, we concluded that ADHD children would be impaired in decision-making strategies depending on their aberrant sensitivity to rewards and punishments. However, we were unable to specify whether large reward SCRs or small punishment SCRs is generated in ADHD children.
早期研究表明，注意力缺陷多动障碍（ADHD）与对奖励和惩罚的异常敏感有关。尽管一些研究使用爱荷华赌博任务关注ADHD儿童的现实生活决策，但在赌博任务中常用的决策能力指标——好牌选择的数量，不足以用于研究受试者复杂的决策策略。在本研究中，我们调查了ADHD儿童的决策策略，分析了赌博任务中带有奖励、带有惩罚以及不带奖励和惩罚的T型模式，并研究了决策策略与对奖励和惩罚的皮肤电反应（SCR）之间的关系。我们假设ADHD儿童和正常儿童在赌博任务中会根据他们对奖励和惩罚的敏感度采用不同的决策策略。我们的结果显示，ADHD儿童带有惩罚的T型模式较少，且呈现出带有奖励的T型模式较多的显著趋势，从而支持了我们的假设。此外，与正常儿童不同，ADHD儿童未能表现出奖励和惩罚的皮肤电反应之间的差异，这支持了他们对奖励和惩罚具有异常敏感性的观点。因此，我们得出结论，ADHD儿童会因其对奖励和惩罚的异常敏感而在决策策略上受损。然而，我们无法确定ADHD儿童产生的是大的奖励皮肤电反应还是小的惩罚皮肤电反应。
