1: Neuropsychol Dev Cogn C Child Neuropsychol. 2004
Sep;10(3):162-72.
Duration judgments in children with ADHD suggest deficient utilization of
temporal information rather than general impairment in timing.
Radonovich KJ, Mostofsky SH.
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, The Johns Hopkins University
School of Medicine, USA.
Clinicians, parents, and teachers alike have noted that individuals with ADHD
often have difficulties with "time management," which has led some to suggest a
primary deficit in time perception in ADHD. Previous studies have implicated the
basal ganglia, cerebellum, and frontal lobes in time estimation and production,
with each region purported to make different contributions to the processing and
utilization of temporal information. Given the observed involvement of the
frontal-subcortical networks in ADHD, we examined judgment of durations in
children with ADHD (N = 27) and age- and gender-matched control subjects (N =
15). Two judgment tasks were administered: short duration (550 ms) and long
duration (4 s). The two groups did not differ significantly in their judgments
of short interval durations; however, subjects with ADHD performed more poorly
when making judgments involving long intervals. The groups also did not differ
on a judgment-of-pitch task, ruling out a generalized deficit in auditory
discrimination. Selective impairment in making judgments involving long
intervals is consistent with performance by patients with frontal lobe lesions
and suggests that there is a deficiency in the utilization of temporal
information in ADHD (possibly secondary to deficits in working memory and/or
strategy utilization), rather than a problem involving a central timing
mechanism.
