Impaired Resolution of Perceptual Interference as an Endophenotype of ADHD

描述（由研究者提供）：注意缺陷多动障碍是最常见的精神健康障碍之一。最近的估计表明，它影响了2-4%的成年人，其后果包括学业和职业失败，人际关系困难和寻求刺激行为的生活历史。发展我们对ADHD的科学理解的一个关键挑战是缺乏对症状严重程度的客观测量。这些措施将为基础研究项目提供有价值的工具，这些项目要求对ADHD受试者的核心缺陷（内表型）进行持续和定量的测量，通过测量疾病前兆（例如，遗传或环境因素）的更微妙的影响，而不是用症状检查表。我们建议研究一种心理物理程序来评估一个人解决视觉干扰的能力。我们的初步数据显示，ADHD受试者在高干扰显示中有严重的识别目标缺陷，即使他们在同样具有挑战性的不包含分散刺激的显示中表现正常。这些数据表明ADHD受试者在知觉干扰的解决上有很强的选择性缺陷。我们建议在特征明确的ADHD和对照人群中对视觉干扰解决的完整性进行全面评估，样本量足够大，可以仔细检查共病障碍和ADHD亚型的影响。此外，我们将使用我们实验室开发的程序，可以选择性地操纵在出席地点解决干扰的程度。这些任务，结合功能磁共振成像和事件相关的大脑电记录，将提供对ADHD受试者干扰解决的行为和神经特征的深入分析，这可能有助于确定导致该人群干扰解决严重中断的潜在认知障碍。最后，鉴于大多数ADHD理论都认为注意功能存在模态独立缺陷，我们将研究ADHD受试者是否在解决听觉领域的干扰方面存在类似的困难。我们最初的研究将集中在听觉感知空间（即，空间，时间或光谱）中的哪些维度提供了最好的模拟，以确定在视觉领域的干扰的空间维度。

DESCRIPTION (provided by investigator): Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is amongst the most commonly diagnosed mental health disorders. Recent estimates suggest that it affects 2-4% of adults, with consequences that include life histories of academic and occupational failure, interpersonal difficulties and stimulus seeking behaviors. One key challenge for developing our scientific understanding of ADHD is a paucity of objective measures of symptom severity. Such measures would provide valuable tools for basic research programs that call for continuous and quantitative measurements of the core deficits in ADHD subjects (endophenotypes) by allowing measurements of more subtle influences of disease precursors (e.g., genetic or environmental factors) than is possible with symptom checklists. We propose to investigate a psychophysical procedure for estimating an individual's ability to resolve visaul interference. Our preliminary data reveal that ADHD subjects have a severe deficit in discriminating targets in high interference displays, even though they show normal performance with equally challenging displays that do not contain distracting stimuli. These data suggest that ADHD subjects have a strong and selective deficit in the resolution of perceptual interference. We propose a comprehensive assessment of the integrity of visual interference resolution in well characterized ADHD and control popultions, with sample sizes large enough for a careful examination of the influence of co-morbid disorders and ADHD subtypes. In addition, we will use procedures developed within our lab that enable a selective manipulation of the degree to which interference is resolved at attended locations. These tasks, in conjunction with fMRI and event-related electrical recordings of the brain, will provide an in-depth analysis of the behavioral and neural characteristics for interference resolution in ADHD subjects, which may help to identify the underlying cognitive impairments that cause the severe disruptions in resolving interference in this population. Finally, given that most theories of ADHD suggest a modality independent deficit in attentional functions, we will examine whether ADHD subjects have similar difficulties with the resolution of interference in the auditory domain. Our initial studies will focus on the basic question of which dimensions within auditory perceptual space (i.e., spatial, temporal or spectral) provide the best analog to the spatial dimension that determines interference in the visual domain.