Comparison of change detection performance and visual search patterns among children with/without ADHD: Evidence from eye movements.
Kids with ADHD miss visual details because their eyes leave the target too soon—give them shorter steps and visual cues.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Türkan et al. (2016) watched kids' eyes while they hunted for tiny picture changes.
They compared children with ADHD to same-age peers without ADHD.
The lab task was simple: spot what changed on a screen, while a camera tracked every eye move.
What they found
Kids with ADHD missed more changes and looked at the key spot for shorter bursts.
Their eyes jumped away faster, so the brain had less time to notice differences.
How this fits with other research
Donnadieu et al. (2015) saw a similar lag, but in time, not space. Their ADHD group acted like typical kids three years younger on rapid-fire blink tasks.
Lemel et al. (2023) moved the same eye-tracking idea to young adults. They found slower word recognition in noise, showing the attention slip continues with age.
Blanco-Martínez et al. (2025) pooled many motor studies and found medium-sized movement deficits in ADHD. The shorter eye fixations in Nilay’s study line up with that wider motor-timing pattern.
Why it matters
When you teach a child with ADHD, break visual tasks into quick, clear chunks. Add a pointer or highlight to pull the eyes back to the change. Short looks do not mean the child is not trying; the brain needs extra beats to catch up.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: ADHD participants showed poorer change detection performance compared to participants without any diagnosis. The difficulty to detect changes in ADHD children might be due to their voluntary eye movement control and attentional deficits. AIMS: To evaluate change detection performance and visual search patterns of children with ADHD and compare their performances with typically developing (TD) children. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: 48 children (nADHD=24, nTD=24) participated (Mage=8 years, 10 months). Flicker paradigm was used to evaluate change detection performance, while eye movements were recorded during the experiment. RESULTS: Change detection accuracies of TD children were higher compared to ADHD children. TD groups made longer fixations on the changed area and their first fixation duration was also longer than ADHD children which showed that TD children had longer fixation maintenance than ADHD children. CONCLUSIONS: The change detection performance, which is associated with visual attention and memory, was found to be worse in ADHD children than TD children and these children made shorter fixations on the changed area than TD children. The findings were found to be in line with the difficulty to sustain attention in ADHD children that is necessary for encoding the scene properties and goal-oriented behavior.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2016 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2015.12.002