Temporal processing deficit in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: An online assessment

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Developmental Psychology
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) often experience difficulties with temporal processing.
• Accurate temporal perception is crucial for various cognitive functions and daily activities.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate an online temporal processing assessment for remote administration.
• To evaluate the sensitivity of this online assessment in identifying temporal processing deficits in children with ADHD.

Main Methods:

• Recruited 188 children (94 with ADHD, 94 typically developing).
• Administered an online assessment with two temporal-order judgment (TOJ) tasks involving tones and consonant-vowel (CV) syllables at varying interstimulus intervals (ISIs).
• Analyzed accuracy and ISI thresholds, and used logistic regression and ROC analysis to assess diagnostic potential.

Main Results:

• Children with ADHD performed less accurately than typically developing children on both tone and CV tasks, particularly at shorter ISIs.
• ADHD group exhibited a higher ISI passing threshold in the CV task.
• A predictive model using performance on specific tasks showed 75.58% sensitivity and 51.11% specificity for identifying ADHD.

Conclusions:

• The developed online assessment effectively identified temporal processing deficits in children with ADHD.
• This remote assessment tool shows promise for differentiating children with ADHD from typically developing children.