Söderlund Göran B W, Jobs Elisabeth Nilsson
Department of Teacher Education and Sports, Sogn og Fjordane University College Sogndal, Norway.
Department of Psychology, Karolinska University Hospital Stockholm, Sweden.
Front Psychol. 2016 Jan 29;7:34. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00034. eCollection 2016.
The most common neuropsychiatric condition in the in children is attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), affecting ∼6-9% of the population. ADHD is distinguished by inattention and hyperactive, impulsive behaviors as well as poor performance in various cognitive tasks often leading to failures at school. Sensory and perceptual dysfunctions have also been noticed. Prior research has mainly focused on limitations in executive functioning where differences are often explained by deficits in pre-frontal cortex activation. Less notice has been given to sensory perception and subcortical functioning in ADHD. Recent research has shown that children with ADHD diagnosis have a deviant auditory brain stem response compared to healthy controls. The aim of the present study was to investigate if the speech recognition threshold differs between attentive and children with ADHD symptoms in two environmental sound conditions, with and without external noise. Previous research has namely shown that children with attention deficits can benefit from white noise exposure during cognitive tasks and here we investigate if noise benefit is present during an auditory perceptual task. For this purpose we used a modified Hagerman's speech recognition test where children with and without attention deficits performed a binaural speech recognition task to assess the speech recognition threshold in no noise and noise conditions (65 dB). Results showed that the inattentive group displayed a higher speech recognition threshold than typically developed children and that the difference in speech recognition threshold disappeared when exposed to noise at supra threshold level. From this we conclude that inattention can partly be explained by sensory perceptual limitations that can possibly be ameliorated through noise exposure.
儿童中最常见的神经精神疾病是注意力缺陷多动障碍（ADHD），影响约6%至9%的人口。ADHD的特征是注意力不集中、多动、冲动行为以及在各种认知任务中表现不佳，常导致学业失败。还发现了感觉和知觉功能障碍。先前的研究主要集中在执行功能的局限性上，其中差异通常由前额叶皮层激活不足来解释。在ADHD中，对感觉知觉和皮层下功能的关注较少。最近的研究表明，与健康对照组相比，被诊断为ADHD的儿童有异常的听觉脑干反应。本研究的目的是调查在有和没有外部噪音的两种环境声音条件下，注意力集中的儿童和有ADHD症状的儿童之间的言语识别阈值是否存在差异。先前的研究表明，有注意力缺陷的儿童在认知任务中可以从白噪音暴露中受益，在这里我们调查在听觉感知任务中是否存在噪音益处。为此，我们使用了改良的哈格曼言语识别测试，有和没有注意力缺陷的儿童进行双耳言语识别任务，以评估在无噪音和噪音条件（65分贝）下的言语识别阈值。结果表明，注意力不集中组的言语识别阈值高于正常发育的儿童，并且当暴露于超阈值水平的噪音时，言语识别阈值的差异消失。由此我们得出结论，注意力不集中部分可以由感觉知觉限制来解释，而这种限制可能通过噪音暴露得到改善。
