Neuroscience Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, United States; Department of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University, 1 Silber Way, Boston, MA, 02215, United States.
Neuroscience Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, United States.
Brain Res. 2023 Jan 1;1798:148144. doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2022.148144. Epub 2022 Oct 31.
Human cognitive abilities naturally vary along a spectrum, even among those we call "neurotypical". Individuals differ in their ability to selectively attend to goal-relevant auditory stimuli. We sought to characterize this variability in a cohort of people with diverse attentional functioning. We recruited both neurotypical (N = 20) and ADHD (N = 25) young adults, all with normal hearing. Participants listened to one of three concurrent, spatially separated speech streams and reported the order of the syllables in that stream while we recorded electroencephalography (EEG). We tested both the ability to sustain attentional focus on a single "Target" stream and the ability to monitor the Target but flexibly either ignore or switch attention to an unpredictable "Interrupter" stream from another direction that sometimes appeared. Although differences in both stimulus structure and task demands affected behavioral performance, ADHD status did not. In both groups, the Interrupter evoked larger neural responses when it was to be attended compared to when it was irrelevant, including for the P3a "reorienting" response previously described as involuntary. This attentional modulation was weaker in ADHD listeners, even though their behavioral performance was the same. Across the entire cohort, individual performance correlated with the degree of top-down modulation of neural responses. These results demonstrate that listeners differ in their ability to modulate neural representations of sound based on task goals, while suggesting that adults with ADHD may have weaker volitional control of attentional processes than their neurotypical counterparts.
人类认知能力在自然范围内存在差异，即使是在我们称之为“神经典型”的人群中也是如此。个体在选择性关注与目标相关的听觉刺激方面的能力存在差异。我们试图在具有不同注意力功能的人群中描述这种可变性。我们招募了神经典型（N=20）和 ADHD（N=25）的年轻成年人，他们都有正常的听力。参与者听取三个同时进行的、空间上分离的语音流中的一个，并在我们记录脑电图（EEG）的同时报告该流中音节的顺序。我们测试了在单个“目标”流上保持注意力集中的能力，以及在能够灵活地忽略或将注意力切换到来自另一个方向的不可预测的“中断”流的能力，该流有时会出现。尽管刺激结构和任务要求的差异影响了行为表现，但 ADHD 状态没有影响。在两组中，与无关时相比，当 Interrupter 被注意到时，它会引起更大的神经反应，包括之前描述为无意识的 P3a“重新定向”反应。ADHD 听众的这种注意力调节较弱，尽管他们的行为表现相同。在整个队列中，个体表现与神经反应的自上而下调节程度相关。这些结果表明，听众在根据任务目标调节声音的神经表示方面存在差异，同时表明 ADHD 成年人可能比神经典型成年人对注意力过程的意志控制较弱。
