Gaze-induced exogenous attentional deficits in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: Evidence from oculomotor inhibition of return and linear ballistic accumulator modeling

Abstract

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a common neurodevelopmental disorder in children. Prior research indicated that children with ADHD often experience deficits in social cognition, particularly in understanding and responding to social signals like eye gaze. Nonetheless, it is not clear whether they can produce normal attentional orienting to gaze cues. The present study used a gaze cue-target paradigm, with the oculomotor inhibition of return (IOR) effect as an indicator of exogenous attentional orienting, to examine whether the ability of children with ADHD to produce exogenous attentional orienting to gaze cues is impaired. The results showed that typically developing (TD) children produced the oculomotor IOR effect induced by gaze cues, whereas children with ADHD did not produce the oculomotor IOR effect. These results indicated that the ability to produce exogenous attentional orienting to gaze cues is impaired in children with ADHD. The linear ballistic accumulator (LBA) model further revealed that, in TD children, gaze cues modulated information-processing efficiency during the oculomotor IOR time window. However, in children with ADHD, information-processing efficiency was not affected by gaze cues during this time window. These findings provide evidence from eye movement and computational modeling for social cognitive deficits and attentional orienting deficits in children with ADHD.