Auditory attentional abilities in hyperactive children.

Using dichotic monitoring procedures, various aspects of auditory attention were examined in hyperactive children and matched normal controls. Hyperactive children did not show deficits in the ability to sustain attention, although signal detection analysis showed some lowered capacity in both focused and selective attention to targets. Subsamples of learning-disabled and neurologically impaired hyperactive children showed minimal impairment of auditory attentional capacities. It was argued that more evidence concerning task and situational effects is needed before it can be claimed that hyperactive children show attention deficits.