An Eyetracking Study on Executive Function in College Students with Different ADHD Tendency Subtypes

• Main Authors: CHEN, TUNG-CHIA, 陳東家
• Other Authors: Lin, Hui-Li
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/70779240804709200635

碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 臨床心理學系碩士班 === 99 === Abstract Background: Empirical studies have shown that approximately 50 to 75% of the individuals who have been diagnosed with ADHD in their childhood still show symptoms of inattention and hyperactivity/impulse in their adolescence and adulthood. Therefore, research focusing on adolescent and adult ADHD patients should also be emphasized. Research has revealed that some neuropsychological deficits of young and grownup ADHD patients are similar, especially the deficit in their executive function. Moreover, previous research pointed out differential performance on neuropsychological tests between children belonged to two ADHD subtypes. The current research is to investigate if this phenomenon exists in college students with different types of ADHD symptom tendency. Procedure: Around 800 students from a private college in northern Taiwan were assessed with the College ADHD Response Evaluation- Student Response Inventory (CARE-SRI) and adult ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS). Thirty-six students were identified, recruited and assigned into ADHD-C (12), ADHD-I (12) and control (12) group according to their CARE-SRI and ASRS scores. The participants underwent four eyetracking tasks, visually guided saccades task (control task), task switching, antisaccade task and motor planning task, in order to evaluate their executive function. It was hypothesized that the ADHD-C groups would perform not as well as the other two groups on the later 3 tasks. Results: There were no significant differences on the control task among the 3 groups, indicating equal capacity of visual searching of all the participants. However, there were also no significant differences on the task switching, antisaccade task and motor planning task. Conclusion and Discussion: Our hypotheses were not supported. Some possible reasons may be (1) the participants were college students, to whom the eyetracking tasks might be too monotonic; (2) the motivation of the participants of control group was lower; (3) the participants of ADHD-C group were overjustified; (4) there might be problems concerning the screening process; (5) the comorbidity of adults with ADHD-tendency were not controlled for; (6) there might be differences in ADHD symptoms in childhood and adulthood; and (7) the parameters of each dependent variable of the data from the eyetracking tasks could be set in more detailed ways. Suggestion: Future study may replicate this study on children in Taiwan to reconfirm the results found by O’Driscoll et al. (2005). If results of the two dependent studies converge, further investigation focusing on adult ADHD patients can then be executed. The eyetracking tasks will be eligible for assisting classifying the different subtypes of ADHD in adulthood if they are proved to be valid aseessment for ADHD subtypes