Attentional networks, vigilance, and distraction as a function of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms in an adult community sample

Our work was supported by a predoctoral fellowship (FPU17/06169) awarded to Tao Coll-Martin from the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sport; a research project grant (PSI2016-79812-P) awarded to Hugo Carretero-Dios from the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry, and Competitiveness; and a research project grant (PSI2017-84926-P) awarded to Juan Lupianez from the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry, and Competitiveness. The funders had no role in any stage of the development and publication of this work. We thank Sophie Forster for her generous availability and valuable intellectual inputs, Fernando Luna for his kind willingness to help with the reliability analysis, and Mateu Servera for his enthusiastic help with the instrument selection process.Attentional difficulties are a core axis in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). However, establishing a consistent and detailed pattern of these neurocognitive alterations has not been an easy endeavour. Based on a dimensional approach to ADHD, the present study aims at comprehensively characterizing three key attentional domains: the three attentional networks (alerting, orienting, and executive attention), two components of vigilance (executive and arousal vigilance), and distraction. To do so, we modified a single, fine-grained task (the ANTI-Vea) by adding irrelevant distractors. One hundred and twenty undergraduates completed three self-reports of ADHD symptoms in childhood and adulthood and performed the ANTI-Vea. Despite the low reliability of some ANTI-Vea indexes, the task worked successfully. While ADHD symptoms in childhood were related to alerting network and arousal vigilance, symptoms in adulthood were linked to executive vigilance. No association between ADHD symptom severity and executive attention and distraction was found. In general, our hypotheses about the relationships between ADHD symptoms and attentional processes were partially supported. We discuss our findings according to ADHD theories and attention measurement.Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sport FPU17/06169Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry, and Competitiveness PSI2016-79812-P PSI2017-84926-