Top-down auditory attention modulates neural responses more strongly in neurotypical than ADHD young adults

[Display omitted] •The ERP P3a is modulated by volitional focus, and not purely bottom-up attention.•Attention modulates neural responses less in ADHD than neurotypical adults.•Individuals’ attention-modulated neural responses correlate to task performance. Human cognitive abilities naturally vary a...

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Published in:Brain research 2023-01, Vol.1798, p.148144-148144, Article 148144
Main Authors: Kwasa, Jasmine A., Noyce, Abigail L., Torres, Laura M., Richardson, Benjamin N., Shinn-Cunningham, Barbara G.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustic Stimulation
Adult ADHD
Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity
Auditory Attention
Auditory Perception - physiology
EEG
Electroencephalography
Hearing Tests
Humans
P3a
Speech
Young Adult
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Summary:[Display omitted] •The ERP P3a is modulated by volitional focus, and not purely bottom-up attention.•Attention modulates neural responses less in ADHD than neurotypical adults.•Individuals’ attention-modulated neural responses correlate to task performance. Human cognitive abilities naturally vary along a spectrum, even among those we call “neurotypical”. Individuals differ in their ability to selectively attend to goal-relevant auditory stimuli. We sought to characterize this variability in a cohort of people with diverse attentional functioning. We recruited both neurotypical (N = 20) and ADHD (N = 25) young adults, all with normal hearing. Participants listened to one of three concurrent, spatially separated speech streams and reported the order of the syllables in that stream while we recorded electroencephalography (EEG). We tested both the ability to sustain attentional focus on a single “Target” stream and the ability to monitor the Target but flexibly either ignore or switch attention to an unpredictable “Interrupter” stream from another direction that sometimes appeared. Although differences in both stimulus structure and task demands affected behavioral performance, ADHD status did not. In both groups, the Interrupter evoked larger neural responses when it was to be attended compared to when it was irrelevant, including for the P3a “reorienting” response previously described as involuntary. This attentional modulation was weaker in ADHD listeners, even though their behavioral performance was the same. Across the entire cohort, individual performance correlated with the degree of top-down modulation of neural responses. These results demonstrate that listeners differ in their ability to modulate neural representations of sound based on task goals, while suggesting that adults with ADHD may have weaker volitional control of attentional processes than their neurotypical counterparts.
ISSN:0006-8993
1872-6240
DOI:10.1016/j.brainres.2022.148144