ADHD desynchronizes brain activity during watching a distracted multi-talker conversation.

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Psychology
• Psychiatry

Background:

• Individuals with ADHD struggle with dynamic environments and multiple sensory inputs.
• Traditional experimental tasks do not fully capture the complexity of everyday situations for ADHD research.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate aberrant brain responses in adults with ADHD using a naturalistic, film-based task with auditory distractors.
• To identify differences in intersubject correlations (ISCs) between ADHD patients and healthy controls in response to complex stimuli.

Main Methods:

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to collect brain data from 51 adults with ADHD and 29 healthy controls.
• A novel permutation-based approach with studentized statistics and subject-wise voxel-level null-distributions was applied.
• Intersubject correlations (ISCs) were analyzed to measure brain activity synchronization.

Main Results:

• Several areas within cerebral attention networks and sensory cortices showed desynchronization in ADHD participants compared to controls.
• Desynchronization in the posterior parietal cortex was observed specifically with irrelevant speech or music, but not white noise or silence.
• Distinct ISC patterns were identified for inattention and impulsivity within the ADHD group.
• Post-scan recall correlated with default-mode network ISCs in ADHD and dorsal attention network ISCs in controls.

Conclusions:

• Intersubject correlations (ISCs) offer valuable insights into how complex environments affect brain states in ADHD.
• ADHD is associated with altered neural synchrony in response to naturalistic auditory stimuli.
• The findings highlight the potential of using complex, ecologically valid tasks to study ADHD.