Abstract
In the present study we examined the ability of individuals with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) to inhibit responses to irrelevant stimulus aspects in conflicting global and local levels of processing. We administered a modified version of the Navon's letters task to adolescents with ADHD and to age- and gender-matched control group. Participants identified the global and local levels of hierarchical figures which were presented in three different display sizes effectively manipulating the visual angle of the local and global elements. Across the size manipulations our control participants showed local precedence and a larger local-to-global interference (with the local elements identified quicker than global ones and harder to ignore when responding to the global shapes). Interestingly, results showed that participants with ADHD had the reverse effect across the size manipulations. For ADHD, global precedence and interference were evident. Although such performance in ADHD is reported here for the first time, it is in fact, in line with one of the clinical symptoms for ADHD (in DSM) which highlights a difficulty in ADHD to attend to details. Thus, it may be the case that in ADHD, either as a consequence of a perceptual characteristic or as a result of altered attention an exaggerated global precedence imposes a challenge in attending to details.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2014