Visual distraction and experience-based suppression in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: A registered report

Although "easily distracted" is a core diagnostic criterion for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), its underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. The few studies on ADHD that relied on experimental tasks specially designed to study visual distraction in the general population reported mixed findings. Here, we suggest that failure to consider experience-based suppression, that is, suppression of irrelevant information after repeated exposures, may explain the inconsistent findings. Therefore, we investigated distraction in ADHD while disentangling distraction by novel salient distractors and experience-based suppression of these distractors. Participants searched for a target shape, and a salient-color distractor was either present or absent. Its color changed at the beginning of each block. We compared baseline distraction (the performance cost on distractor-present versus distractor-absent trials in the first block halves) and feature-based suppression efficiency (the reduction of this cost from the first to the second block half) in participants with ADHD and their controls. The results confirmed our conjecture: Participants with ADHD tended to be more distracted by novel distractors than controls, but they were at least as efficient at suppressing these distractors following a few exposures. These findings explain why studies using rare distractors showed higher distractibility in ADHD, whereas studies using frequently repeated distractors reported no difference. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).