Citation

Zahn TP, Kruesi MJ, Rapoport JL. J. Abnorm. Child Psychol. 1991; 19(2): 233-252.

Affiliation

Laboratory of Psychology and Psychopathology, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1991, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

2056165

Abstract

Boys with diagnoses in the disruptive behavior disorder (DBD) spectrum and normal controls were tested in two reaction time (RT) experiments. In Experiment I simple warned RT was measured and the length and regularity of the preparatory intervals were varied in order to study sustained attention in the sense of preparation. With age and IQ controlled, DBD boys had slower and more variable RT overall than controls and showed generally more pronounced effects of variations in the length and sequence of the preparatory intervals. The results suggest that DBD boys are subject to lapses of attention which are increased by a relatively long preparatory interval, and that they have a particular problem with temporal uncertainty. In Experiment II some aspects of selective attention were studied in a paradigm in which stimulus modality uncertainty and response selection were varied. DBD boys showed greater effects of modality uncertainty but not response selection than controls. No differences between subdiagnoses within the DBD spectrum could be demonstrated.

Language: en