Change blindness in children with ADHD: a selective impairment in visual search?

Objective: This study evaluated change blindness and visual search efficiency in children with ADHD in searching for central and marginal changes.

Method: A total of 36 drug-naïve children (18 ADHD/18 controls) performed a flicker task that included changes in objects of central or marginal interest. The task required observers to search for a change until they detected it.

Results: Children with ADHD performed more slowly and less accurately than did typically developing children, specifically in detecting marginal-interest changes.

Conclusion: In contrast to more standard visual search tasks, flicker tasks seem to be more sensitive to highlight focused attention deficits in children diagnosed with ADHD. Concretely, ADHD attentional deficits were more apparent when the task involved serial top-down strategies.