Distractible children show abnormal orienting to non-attended auditory stimuli.
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.
Kilpeläinen
R
R
Department of Clinical Neurophysiology, Kuopio University Hospital, Finland.
Luoma
L
L
Herrgård
E
E
Sipilä
P
P
Yppärilä
H
H
Partanen
J
J
Karhu
J
J
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*