The role of working memory and organizational skills in academic functioning for children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

Objective: Children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) exhibit difficulties with organizational skills such as task planning, managing materials, and organizing activities that have downstream consequences on academic functioning. At the same time, deficits in working memory have been linked with both the organizational skills difficulties and academic underachievement and underperformance observed in children with ADHD and have been hypothesized to account for the link between organizational and academic functioning. However, the extent to which working memory and organizational skills independently versus jointly contribute to ADHD-related academic difficulties remains unclear.

Working memory and inhibitory control deficits in children with ADHD: an experimental evaluation of competing model predictions.

Introduction: Children with ADHD demonstrate difficulties on many different neuropsychological tests. However, it remains unclear whether this pattern reflects a large number of distinct deficits or a small number of deficit(s) that broadly impact test performance. The current study is among the first experiments to systematically manipulate demands on both working memory and inhibition, with implications for competing conceptual models of ADHD pathogenesis.

Does Anxiety Systematically Bias Estimates of Executive Functioning Deficits in Pediatric Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder?

Growing evidence suggests that childhood ADHD is associated with larger impairments in working memory relative to inhibition. However, most studies have not considered the role of co-occurring anxiety on these estimates - a potentially significant confound given prior evidence that anxiety may increase working memory difficulties but decrease inhibition difficulties for these children. The current study extends prior work to examine the extent to which co-occurring anxiety may be systematically affecting recent estimates of the magnitude of working memory/inhibitory control deficits in ADHD.

Working memory and math skills in children with and without ADHD.

Objective: Children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) frequently demonstrate deficits in working memory and in multiple domains of math skills, including underdeveloped problem-solving and computation skills. The Baddeley model of working memory posits a multicomponent system, including a domain-general central executive and two domain-specific subsystems-phonological short-term memory and visuospatial short-term memory. Extant literature indicates a strong link between neurocognitive deficits in working/short-term memory and math skills; however, the extent to which each component of working/short-term memory may account for this relation is unclear.

Evaluating the Simple View of Reading for Children With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.

The 'simple view of reading' is an influential model of reading comprehension which asserts that children's reading comprehension performance can be explained entirely by their decoding and language comprehension skills. Children with ADHD often exhibit difficulty across all three of these reading domains on standardized achievement tests, yet it is unclear whether the simple view of reading is sufficient to explain reading comprehension performance for these children. The current study was the first to use multiple indicators and latent estimates to examine the veracity of key predictions from the simple view of reading in a clinically-evaluated sample of 250 children with and without ADHD (ages 8-13, M=10.