Artculos Proyecto de Tesis Doctoral

Temporal information processing in ADHD: Findings to date and new methods (Maggie E. Toplak, Colleen Dockstader, Rosemary Tannock)

The ability to perceive and represent time is a fundamental but complex cognitive skill that allows us to perceive and organize sequences of events and actions, and to anticipate or predict when future events will occur. It is a multidimensional construct, and a variety of methods have been used to understand timing performance in ADHD samples, which makes it difficult to integrate findings across studies. While further replication is needed, growing evidence links ADHD to problems in several aspects of temporal information processing, including duration discrimination, duration reproduction, and finger tapping. Neuroimaging studies of ADHD have also implicated cerebellar, basal ganglia, and prefrontal regions of the brain, which are believed to subserve temporal information processing. This line of research implicates more basic cognitive mechanisms than previously linked with ADHD and challenges researchers to develop and utilize innovative, multidisciplinary, scientific methods to dissect the various components of temporal information processing. Recent advances in neuroimaging, such as magnetoencephalography in collaboration with structural magnetic resonance imaging, can discriminate temporal processing at the level of a millisecond. This approach can lay the groundwork to provide a more precise understanding of neural network activity during different aspects and stages of temporal information processing in ADHD.

Timing dficits in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): Evidence from neurocognitive and neuroimaging studies (Valdas Noreika, Christine M. Falter, Katya Rubia)

Relatively recently, neurocognitive and neuroimaging studies have indicated that individuals with attentiondeficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may have deficits in a range of timing functions and their underlying neural networks. Despite this evidence, timing deficits in ADHD are still somewhat neglected in the literature and mostly omitted from reviews on ADHD. There is therefore a lack of integrative reviews on the up-to-date evidence on neurocognitive and neurofunctional deficits of timing in ADHD and their significance with respect to other behavioural and cognitive deficits. The present review provides a synthetic overview of the evidence for neurocognitive and neurofunctional deficits in ADHD in timing functions, and integrates this evidence with the cognitive neuroscience literature of the neural substrates of timing. The review demonstrates that ADHD patients are consistently impaired in three major timing domains, in motor timing, perceptual timing and temporal foresight, comprising several timeframes spanning milliseconds, seconds, minutes and longer intervals up to years. The most consistent impairments in ADHD are found in sensorimotor synchronisation, duration discrimination, reproduction and delay discounting. These neurocognitive findings of timing deficits in ADHD are furthermore supported by functional neuroimaging studies that show dysfunctions in the key inferior fronto-striato-cerebellar and fronto-parietal networks that mediate the timing functions. Although there is evidence that these timing functions are inter-correlated with other executive functions that are well established to be impaired in the disorder, in particular working memory, attention, and to a lesser degree inhibitory control, the key timing deficits appear to survive when these functions are controlled for, suggesting independent cognitive deficits in the temporal domain. There is furthermore strong evidence for an association between timing deficits and behavioural measures of impulsiveness and inattention, suggesting that timing problems are key to the clinical behavioural profile of ADHD. Emerging evidence shows that the most common treatment of ADHD with the dopamine agonist and psychostimulant Methylphenidate attenuates most timing deficits in ADHD and normalises the abnormally blunted

recruitment of the underlying fronto-striato-cerebellar networks. Timing function deficits in ADHD, therefore, next to executive function deficits, form an independent impairment domain, and should receive more attention in neuropsychological, neuroimaging, and pharmacological basic research as well as in translational research aimed to develop pharmacological or non-pharmacological treatment of abnormal timing behaviour and cognition in ADHD.

Time perception dficit in children with ADHD

Time perception deficit has been demonstrated in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) by using time production and time reproduction tasks. The impact of motor demand, however, has not yet been fully examined. The current study, which is reported herein, aimed to investigate the pure time perception of Chinese children with ADHD by using a duration discrimination task. A battery of tests that were specifically designed to measure time perception and other related abilities, such as inhibition, attention, and working memory, was administered to 40 children with ADHD and to 40 demographically matched healthy children. A repeated measure MANOVA indicated that children with ADHD showed significantly higher discrimination thresholds than did healthy controls, and there was an interaction effect between group and duration. Pairwise comparison indicated that children with ADHD were less accurate in discriminating duration at either target duration. Working memory (Corsi blocks task) was related to the discrimination threshold at a duration of 800 ms after controlling for full-scale IQ (FIQ) in the ADHD group, but this did not survive the Bonferroni correction. The results indicated that children with ADHD may have perceptual deficits in time discrimination. They needed a greater difference between the comparison and target intervals to discriminate the short, median, and long durations reliably. This study provides further support for the existence of a generic time perception deficit, which is probably due to the involvement of a dysfunctional frontostriatocerebellar network in this capacity, especially the presence of deficits in basic internal timing mechanisms.

A computerized system for measuring time perception in human subjects (Vicente M. Simon, Rosa Redolat, Andres Parra, Carmen Carrasco, Eugene Somoza)

We describe an integrated computerized approach to the design, execution and recording of time perception experiments in human subjects. The program is menu driven and runs on an IBM-compatible microcomputer. The method is easy to use, non-obtrusive to the subjects, and flexible enough to allow the investigator to design studies with a wide range of experimental protocols and study parameters. The fact that the results do not depend on proctor bias or subject-proctor interactions are additional advantages. The technique was applied to study the effects of prompt positive feedback on the time perception of normal human subjects who undergo training. The results of this study are reported.