Acquisition of attention skill in pervasively hyperactive children

The hypothesis that pervasively hyperactive children have disturbed attention and fail to acquire learning skills is tested. Attention and learning skills are defined here in terms of the controlled versus automatic processing distinction. In this report 12 pervasively hyperactive children and 12 controls were compared for their ability to develop automatic information processing during a memory recognition task. It was predicted that, if hyperactive children failed to adopt task-appropriate cognitive sets, automatic processing would either fail or develop more slowly than in controls. The data indicated that the groups differed in task efficiency: hyperactive children were slower, within-subject variance of reaction time was greater, and errors occurred more frequently than in controls. However, group differences could not be explained in terms of an attention dysfunction or an inability to develop automatic processing in the hyperactive child.