Study reveals the characteristics of prospective memory function in ADHD children

Prospective memory refers to an individual's ability to remember tasks to be completed in the future After children enter school, the task of prospective memory increases gradually, and the requirement of prospective memory ability increases gradually The key to the success of prospective memory task is that individuals can actively extract and execute intentions when they see clues There are three types of prospective memory cues: time cues (such as remembering to attend a friend's birthday party at 7 p.m on Saturday), event cues (such as remembering to buy fruit when passing by the supermarket) and activity ending cues (such as remembering to ask for parents' signature after finishing homework) There are differences in the difficulty of extracting the three clues, which may be related to the different needs of attention resources Compared with children with normal development, ADHD children often show inattention and forgetfulness in daily activities, which suggests that their prospective memory ability may be defective However, there are few researches on the prospective memory function of ADHD children, and even less researches on the prospective memory performance and cognitive processing characteristics of ADHD children under three cue conditions Therefore, Chen Chuqiao's research group of neuropsychology and Applied Cognitive Neuroscience (NaCN), the Key Laboratory of mental health, Institute of psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, cooperated with Qian Ying, a doctor of the sixth Peking Medical College, and Wang Yanyu, a professor of Weifang Medical College, to investigate the prospective memory performance of ADHD children under the conditions of time, event and end of activity clues In this study, 28 clinically diagnosed ADHD children and 28 age and gender matched normal development children were recruited The prospective memory function of children under three cue conditions was measured by fishing game task (Yang, Chan, Shum, 2011) This task adopts the classic dual task paradigm The main task requires children to fish and pay attention to prospective memory cues at the same time When online retrieval appears, children need to stop fishing and perform prospective memory tasks Under the condition of time clue, children should remember to feed cats and fish every whole minute; under the condition of event clue, children should remember to feed cats when they see special striped fish; at the end of activity clue, children should remember to row and dock when they see fish bones after fishing At the same time, the study also measured children's intelligence and two kinds of attention function (continuous attention and attention conversion) The study found that although the intelligence of ADHD children is lower than that of normal children, and attention deficit exists, the prospective memory performance of ADHD children is similar to that of normal children, and there is no deficit Further analysis showed that cues had a significant impact on the performance of prospective memory task, and the influence mode was similar in ADHD children and normal development children, that is, prospective memory performance was the best under the end of activity cues, significantly better than that under event cues, and the worst under time cues This result shows that the end of activity has certain advantages as a prospective memory clue In this situation, because the activity has ended, children have more attention resources to allocate to prospective memory clues, and are more likely to detect clues and extract intentions In contrast, both event and time cues require children to actively monitor the cues while completing the main task When children do not actively monitor the cues, it may lead to the failure of cue detection and intention extraction Time cues are usually more difficult to detect than event cues, so more monitoring is needed and their performance is worse It is worth noting that under the condition of event clue prospective memory task, although the prospective memory task performance of ADHD children is similar to that of normal children, their main task performance is worse This may be due to the limited attention resources of ADHD children They need to consume more attention resources than normal children when monitoring prospective memory clues and completing prospective memory tasks, and thus more damage to the performance of the main task In conclusion, ADHD children's attention is limited, and it is difficult to balance the main task and prospective memory task Parents and teachers can try to arrange prospective memory tasks after the end of the main task In this case, because the main task is over, children no longer need to allocate attention resources to the main task, so they are more likely to recall the prospective memory task Similarly, teachers and parents can also consider using event cues or end of activity cues instead of time cues because children have obvious difficulties in completing time prospective memory tasks