Spatial cueing effects of social cues in children with ADHD: development of an assessment tool
Résumé
Recent studies have shown that some children with ADHD have difficulties in following other’s gaze and/or pointing finger towards the surrounding space, which can be linked to their relational difficulties in daily life. Our aim is to develop an evaluative tool that will allow neuropsychologists to identify these children, in order to refine their cognitive remediation therapy.
For this purpose, we pretested three versions of the tool in typically developing children. Children without disorders, aged from 7 to 9 years, had to press a but ton as soon as an object appeared on the screen, at the left or the right of an individual. In two thirds of the trials, the side of the object appearance was cued by the individual either by deviating her gaze or by pointing with her finger. In the first version (19 children), these congruent trials were compared to neutral trials in which the individual did not move before the object appearance. In the second version (18 children), congruent trials were compared to moving trials in which the individual pointed her finger towards the children before the object appearance. In the third version (15 children), congruent trials were compared to incongruent trials in which the individual gazed or pointed towards the opposite side of the object appearance.
Results have shown that congruent pointing finger triggered strong cueing effects compared to neutral, moving or incongruent trials. By contrast, the strength of the gaze cueing effect depended on the comparison trials. When compared to incongruent trials, congruent gazing and pointing led to similar and robust effects.
In conclusion, the version manipulating incongruent trials, which controls for alerting effect induced by gaze or finger movements respectively, was the most appropriate to measure social cueing effects in children with ADHD and was chosen to be calibrated in typically developing children.
Domaines
PsychologieOrigine | Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s) |
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