Evaluation of cognitive functions in children with developmental disorders : An event-related brain potential research

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The purpose of theis study is to evaluate cognitive functions in children with developmental disorders, using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) as a noninvasive measure for the brain functions. Auditory and visual cognitive functions in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorders (ADHD) were investigated in several experiments.1. Discrimination of speech perception : ERPs were recorded from multi-stimulus oddball paradigm, in which the participants detected a pure tone among the speed sounds. The results showed that ADHD children not only have a problem in pure tone discrimination from speech sounds, but also they do not allocate their attentional resource to the processing for task irrelevant deviation.2. Visual search : While detecting one of two pop-out stimuli (in color or orientation) among a non-pop-out stimulus sequence, ERP results revealed that ADHD children have no problem on detecting the pop-out stimulus, whereas they have difficulties to allocate the resour … More ce to the stimulus for further processing.3. Visual selection : In visual selection task, 4 types of line drawings (2 colors X 2 semantic categories) were presented and the participants detected a target defined by the specific combination of each dimension. The results indicated that ADHD children have difficulty in adopting adequate selection strategy. In contrast, when the selection dimension was simple (color X form), they took the same selection strategy with the control children, althought the selection processes were delayed.4. Visual distraction : ERP results from two experiments revealed that ADHD children are more distractible for task irrelevant deviant stimulus, whereas they allocate less resources to task irrelevant deviation within the task relevant stimulus.These results indicate that ERPs could reveal the cognitive properties of ADHD even when no deficit in behavioral performance was observed. The utility of ERP research on developmental disorders to establish the concept, manner of diagnosis, and effective treatment is expected. Less