This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
Heightened sensitivity to reward influences cognitive performance among children with ADHD
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder exhibited greater improvement in cognitive task performance with reinforcement because of higher trait sensitivity to reward, not because of poorer performance in cognitive functioning at baseline.
“Cognitive and motivational impairments have been central in leading theories of ADHD, and most research to date has understandably focused on evaluating diagnostic group differences in reinforcement effects on cognition. To advance the field, it is critical to examine constructs that may contribute to observed group differences in response to reinforcement,” Whitney D. Fosco, a lecturer at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and colleagues wrote.
To evaluate how cognitive and motivational processes affect diagnostic group differences in reinforcement effects, researchers had 25 children with ADHD and 33 controls complete tasks measuring inhibitory control, working memory and sustained attention. The participants completed tasks at baseline and then 1 week later with and without reinforcement. Parents and children reported trait sensitivity to reward to categorize children’s response toward appetitive, rewarding stimuli.
Children with ADHD had higher sensitivity to reward composite ratings compared with controls. Although children with ADHD performed worse in each cognitive domain, the moderate diagnostic group difference in baseline cognition was not statistically significant. This may be due to heterogeneity of cognitive deficits in ADHD, according to researchers.
Improvement in overall cognition after reinforcement was greater among children with ADHD. Baseline cognition and sensitivity to reward moderated the effect of reinforcement on cognition, as those with the lowest baseline cognitive performance were the most affected by reinforcement. This suggests a relationship between baseline cognition and sensitivity to reward and the effect of reinforcement on cognitive performance.
When tested simultaneously, interactions between diagnostic group and reinforcement and sensitivity to reward and reinforcement became insignificant, which suggests the stronger response to reinforcement observed among children with ADHD is related to their greater sensitivity to reward.
“Though these data suggest that individual differences in sensitivity to reward are central to understanding reinforcement in ADHD, key replications and extensions are warranted to more fully evaluate this hypothesis. The reliability of the composite [sensitivity to reward] measure (α = .65) was somewhat low for a trait index, which is likely due to the multi-informant approach used,” Fosco and colleagues wrote. “However, this approach mitigated concerns about a single reporter (parents) driving the relationship between diagnosis and [sensitivity to reward]. Moreover, the reliability was strong enough that composite [sensitivity to reward] robustly predicted individual differences in the impact of reinforcement on cognition in the present work. Nevertheless, in the future we plan to extend [sensitivity to reward] beyond questionnaire measures to behavioral measures of reinforcement, such as progressive ratio reinforcement tasks.” – by Amanda Oldt
Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts