Bell Laura, Scharke Wolfgang, Reindl Vanessa, Fels Janina, Neuschaefer-Rube Christiane, Konrad Kerstin
Child Neuropsychology Section, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy, Medical Faculty, RWTH Aachen University, D-52074 Aachen, Germany.
Institute of Cognitive and Experimental Psychology, RWTH Aachen University, D-52074 Aachen, Germany.
Brain Sci. 2020 May 18;10(5):307. doi: 10.3390/brainsci10050307.
Children fitted with hearing aids (HAs) and children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) often have marked difficulties concentrating in noisy environments. However, little is known about the underlying neural mechanism of auditory and visual attention deficits in a direct comparison of both groups. The current functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) study was the first to investigate the behavioral performance and neural activation during an auditory and a visual go/nogo paradigm in children fitted with bilateral HAs, children with ADHD and typically developing children (TDC). All children reacted faster, but less accurately, to visual than auditory stimuli, indicating a sensory-specific response inhibition efficiency. Independent of modality, children with ADHD and children with HAs reacted faster and tended to show more false alarms than TDC. On a neural level, however, children with ADHD showed supra-modal neural alterations, particularly in frontal regions. On the contrary, children with HAs exhibited modality-dependent alterations in the right temporopolar cortex. Higher activation was observed in the auditory than in the visual condition. Thus, while children with ADHD and children with HAs showed similar behavioral alterations, different neural mechanisms might underlie these behavioral changes. Future studies are warranted to confirm the current findings with larger samples. To this end, fNIRS provided a promising tool to differentiate the neural mechanisms underlying response inhibition deficits between groups and modalities.
佩戴助听器（HA）的儿童和患有注意力缺陷多动障碍（ADHD）的儿童在嘈杂环境中往往存在明显的注意力集中困难。然而，在对这两组儿童进行直接比较时，对于听觉和视觉注意力缺陷的潜在神经机制却知之甚少。当前的功能近红外光谱（fNIRS）研究首次调查了双侧佩戴HA的儿童、ADHD儿童和正常发育儿童（TDC）在听觉和视觉的“是/否”范式中的行为表现和神经激活情况。所有儿童对视觉刺激的反应比对听觉刺激更快，但准确性更低，这表明存在感觉特异性反应抑制效率。与刺激方式无关，ADHD儿童和佩戴HA的儿童反应更快，并且比TDC儿童更容易出现误报。然而，在神经层面上，ADHD儿童表现出超模态神经改变，特别是在额叶区域。相反，佩戴HA的儿童在右侧颞极皮质表现出与刺激方式相关的改变。在听觉条件下观察到的激活高于视觉条件。因此，虽然ADHD儿童和佩戴HA的儿童表现出相似的行为改变，但这些行为变化可能存在不同的神经机制。未来的研究有必要用更大的样本量来证实当前的研究结果。为此，fNIRS为区分不同组和不同刺激方式下反应抑制缺陷的潜在神经机制提供了一个有前景的工具。
