Distractible children show abnormal orienting to non-attended auditory stimuli

Event-related potentials were recorded in response to intermittently presented, non-attended trains of identical auditory stimuli in healthy 9-year-old children. In abnormally distractible children (n =24), the first tone in each train elicited a significantly larger N1 vertex response than in the non-distractible children (n 24), suggesting that increased distractibility may be associated with an abnormally strong cerebral orienting towards non-attended stimuli. A later negativity at around 300 ms, which increases in amplitude with stimulus repetition and may thus reflect the building up of a functional neuronal representation of the stimulus properties, was significantly smaller in the distractible than in the non-distractible children. These findings demonstrate that event-related potential measures may be useful in helping to understand the information processing found in distractible children.