Authors:

ShuNing Guo

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About Paper:

Sustained attention is the ability to remain focused on a task over time while resisting distraction, and people differ widely in this ability. This is especially true for individuals with mental health diagnoses like ADHD [1]. However, it is unclear whether variation in psychiatric symptom traits predicts distractibility among adults without a disorder diagnosis. We hypothesized that higher ADHD-related symptoms and schizotypal traits would predict greater distractibility, motivated by evidence linking ADHD to increased mind wandering [2] and schizophrenia-spectrum conditions to difficulties with rule selection and goal maintenance [3]. Eighty adults were recruited online and completed questionnaires assessing ADHD-related symptoms, anxiety, depression, impulsivity, and schizotypal traits. Participants also completed the Cognitive Functioning Questionnaire to measure self-reported distractibility in everyday life and a Switch Continuous Performance Task to measure objective distractibility during task performance. In the Switch CPT, participants responded to pairs of stimuli (trees, numbers, and letters) according to a current task rule (e.g., press the spacebar for consonants). The task was organized into blocks where the rule either stayed the same throughout the block (repeat blocks) or changed relative to the previous block (switch blocks; e.g., switching from consonants to even numbers). Objective distractibility was indexed by switch cost, which is calculated by the increase in error rate from repeat to switch blocks, which reflects interference from the previously relevant rule. We found that self-reported distractibility was significantly associated with psychiatric symptom measures. Unexpectedly, higher levels of anxiety and ADHD-related symptoms were associated with lower switch cost, defined as the increase in error rate from repeat to switch blocks. This pattern may indicate that individuals with these psychiatric traits can better switch between competing goals. More broadly, this work suggests that psychiatric traits may relate differently to task-based indices and subjective reports of everyday distractibility.

Source:

University of Chicago

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Co-authors:

ShuNing Guo