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Updated: Jun 8, 2026
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Published on: April 1, 2018
Basic impairments in regulating the speed-accuracy tradeoff predict symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity
Martijn J Mulder1, Dienke Bos, Juliette M H Weusten
1Rudolf Magnus Institute of Neuroscience, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, University Medical Center Utrecht, the Netherlands. m.j.mulder@gmail.com
Background:
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is characterized by poor optimization of behavior in the face of changing demands. Theoretical accounts of ADHD have often focused on higher-order cognitive processes and typically assume that basic processes are unaffected. It is an open question whether this is indeed the case.
Method:
We explored basic cognitive processing in 25 subjects with ADHD and 30 typically developing children and adolescents with a perceptual decision-making paradigm. We investigated whether individuals with ADHD were able to balance the speed and accuracy of decisions.
Results:
We found impairments in the optimization of the speed-accuracy tradeoff. Furthermore, these impairments were directly related to the hyperactive and impulsive symptoms that characterize the ADHD-phenotype.
Conclusions:
These data suggest that impairments in basic cognitive processing are central to the disorder. This calls into question conceptualizations of ADHD as a "higher-order" deficit, as such simple decision processes are at the core of almost every paradigm used in ADHD research.
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