ADHD and the visual oddball task

Patients with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) have impairments in the control of attentional aspects which might be due to enhanced distraction to other stimuli (Marzinzik, Wahl, Kruger, Gentschow, Colla, and Klosterman, 2012). Patients with ADHD and healthy control participants performed on the visual oddball task, which measures novelty processing. During the task ERP's were recorded from the scalp. The behavior task, in which familiar and non-familiar stimuly were assesed did not differ among the both groups. However, it was found that healthy control participants had different frontal event-related potentials to familiar versus unfamiliar stimuli, which was found to be not evident in the patients with ADHD. The novelty event-related potential is called the P3, occuring about 300ms post-stimulus. It is argued by the authors that in patients with ADHD the recall of automatically semantic information on stimuli is impaired (Marzinzik et al., 2012).