Comparison of change detection performance and visual search patterns among children with/without ADHD: Evidence from eye movements

• Change detection performances of ADHD and typically developing (TD) children were investigated.
• Accuracy percentages of ADHD children were lower than TD children.
• Both groups of children detected central interest changes in the scene more accurately and rapidly than marginal interest changes.
• TD children fixated mostly on the changed area whereas ADHD children fixated mostly on the whole scene.

BackgroundADHD participants showed poorer change detection performance compared to participants without any diagnosis. The difficulty to detect changes in ADHD children might be due to their voluntary eye movement control and attentional deficits.AimsTo evaluate change detection performance and visual search patterns of children with ADHD and compare their performances with typically developing (TD) children.Methods and procedures48 children (nADHD = 24, nTD = 24) participated (Mage = 8 years, 10 months). Flicker paradigm was used to evaluate change detection performance, while eye movements were recorded during the experiment.ResultsChange detection accuracies of TD children were higher compared to ADHD children. TD groups made longer fixations on the changed area and their first fixation duration was also longer than ADHD children which showed that TD children had longer fixation maintenance than ADHD children.ConclusionsThe change detection performance, which is associated with visual attention and memory, was found to be worse in ADHD children than TD children and these children made shorter fixations on the changed area than TD children. The findings were found to be in line with the difficulty to sustain attention in ADHD children that is necessary for encoding the scene properties and goal-oriented behavior.