Attention Performance in an Epidemiological Sample of Urban Children: The Role of Gender and Verbal Intelligence

We administered a comprehensive attentional battery to an epidemiologically defined sample of 435 first and second-grade children to assess the influence of gender and verbal intelligence on attention. The battery included three versions of the continuous performance test (CPT), two digit cancellation tasks, three subtests from the WISC-R, and the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. The results indicated that both gender and intelligence had an impact on attentional performance. Girls performed better than boys; they made fewer errors on the CPT and obtained higher scores on the digit cancellation task and the Coding subtest of the WISC-R. Children with higher verbal intelligence also performed better on the attentional tests, but this advantage was not observed across measures or levels of performance. For example, children with limited verbal skills performed significantly worse than their peers only in measures with high processing demands(the degraded CPT and the distraction version of the digit cancellation task)

Executive functioning in children with an autism spectrum disorder: Can we differentiate

The aim of this study was to investigate whether children with high-functioning autism (HFA), Asperger's syndrome (AS), and pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified (PDDNOS) can be differentiated from each other and from normal controls on their neurocognitive executive functioning (EF) profile. Children with HFA and AS showed the most EF deficits. The EF profile of the PDDNOS group was more disturbed that the normal control group, but was less disturbed than the profile of the HFA and AS groups. Little difference was found between the three PDD subtypes with respect to EF. This study supports the view that executive dysfunctioning plays an important role in autism. The usefulness of a distinction between different PDD subtypes was not demonstrated. © 2006 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc

Attentional set shifting in autism spectrum disorder: Differentiating between the role of perseveration, learned irrelevance, and novelty processing

Item does not contain fulltextAutism spectrum disorders (ASD) are associated with impaired attentional set shifting, which may reflect enhanced perseverative responding, enhanced learned irrelevance, and/or reduced novelty processing. We assessed the contribution of these potential error sources in ASD adults. A total of 17 ASD and 19 matched comparison individuals first solved a discrimination learning task. Thereafter, the participants faced three types of attentional shift, specifically designed to isolate the effect of the three possible error sources. ASD participants made more errors than comparison individuals in a shift implying a choice between a novel relevant stimulus attribute and a familiar attribute that was previously relevant but now irrelevant. However, they made fewer errors in a shift involving a choice between a novel irrelevant attribute and a familiar, previously irrelevant but now relevant attribute. The results in combination suggest that the performance difference, at least in the present shift task, is caused by reduced novelty processing in ASD participants