title: Distractible children show abnormal orienting to non-attended auditory stimuli.
abstract: Event-related potentials were recorded in response to intermittently presented, non-attended trains of identical auditory stimuli in healthy 9-year-old children. In abnormally distractible children (n =24), the first tone in each train elicited a significantly larger N1 vertex response than in the non-distractible children (n 24), suggesting that increased distractibility may be associated with an abnormally strong cerebral orienting towards non-attended stimuli. A later negativity at around 300 ms, which increases in amplitude with stimulus repetition and may thus reflect the building up of a functional neuronal representation of the stimulus properties, was significantly smaller in the distractible than in the non-distractible children. These findings demonstrate that event-related potential measures may be useful in helping to understand the information processing found in distractible children.
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical Neurophysiology, Kuopio University Hospital, Finland.
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Kilpeläinen
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Luoma
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Herrgård
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Sipilä
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Yppärilä
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Partanen
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Karhu
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001289:Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity / Q000503:physiopathology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology; D002648:Child; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006185:Habituation, Psychophysiologic / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009949:Orientation / Q000502:physiology*