E-ISSN : 2733-4538
The present research was conducted to investigate sustained attention of ADHD children using vigilance tasks, 50 boys(25 ADHD boys and 25 normal boys) between the ages of 5 years 4 months and 12 years 5 months were given three types of Continuous Performance Test(CPT)-Korean letter CPT, Card CPT, Degraded Digit CPT-under feedback and no feedback condition. The performance of ADHD group and normal group was compared on the two parameters derived through signal detection analysis-d', for perceptual sensitivity and for decision criterion cutoff. The effects of positive feedback were also evaluated. The results indicated that ADHD children showed lower perceptual sensitivity suggesting that attention deficit of ADHD is related to deficit in perceptual sensitivity at the early stage of information processing. Although there was no group difference in the decision criterion cutoff, ADHD children showed more anticipatory responses than normal children, which indicates a deficit in the inhibitory control mechanism. Under the positive feedback condition, both groups of children obtained more hits, made fewer errors, and showed higher perceptual sensitivity than under the no feedback condition, indicating positive feedback was beneficial for both normal and ADHD boys. Further studies using a variety of CPT tasks with varying task difficulty will be necessary to clarify inconsistent results reported in the literature and also to develop a task most sensitive to subtle attentional deficits of ADHD.