Is the impairment in temporal allocation of visual attention in children with ADHD related to a developmental delay or a structural cognitive deficit?
ADHD attention runs about three years late, so slow the pace instead of simplifying content.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Donnadieu et al. (2015) watched how fast kids could spot two quick pictures. The first picture grabs attention, then a second one flashes soon after.
Kids with ADHD were compared to same-age peers and to younger kids without ADHD. The goal was to see if ADHD kids act like younger kids or show a brand-new problem.
What they found
Eleven-year-olds with ADHD missed the second picture as often as healthy eight-year-olds. Their attention blink looked three years behind.
This supports a delay story, not a special deficit story. The brain is catching up, just slower.
How this fits with other research
Qian et al. (2013) saw the same delay pattern in broader executive skills. ADHD kids lagged on shifting and inhibition but not on working memory, matching the slow-maturation idea.
Lemel et al. (2023) pushed the delay into adulthood. Young adults with ADHD processed spoken words 140 ms slower in noise, showing the lag persists across ages and senses.
Türkan et al. (2016) seems to clash at first. They found ADHD kids looked at changed spots for shorter times and missed more changes. The two studies differ in timing: Sophie tested ultra-rapid attention within half a second, while Nilay gave kids several seconds to scan. Short gaze time hurts only when the scene stays; it does not affect quick blink tasks.
Why it matters
Treat slow attention like a developmental stage, not a fixed flaw. Give extra wait time, break rapid instructions into chunks, and preview material twice. Expect catch-up by mid-teens rather than lifelong impairment.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
We investigated the temporal allocation of visual attention in 11-year-old children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) by comparing their attentional blink (AB) parameters (duration, amplitude and minimum performance) with those observed in three groups of healthy control participants (8-year-olds, 11-year-olds and adults). The AB is a marker of impaired ability to detect a second target following the identification of a first target when both appear randomly within a rapid sequence of distractor items. Our results showed developmental effects; with age, the AB duration decreased and the AB minimum moved to shorter lag times. Importantly, 11-year old children with ADHD presented much the same similar AB patterns (in terms of duration and minimum position) as the healthy 8-year-old controls. Our results support the hypothesis whereby impaired allocation of temporal selective attention in children with ADHD is due to a developmental delay and not a specific cognitive deficit.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2015 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2014.10.014