Visual Search in Chinese Children With Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and Comorbid Developmental Dyslexia: Evidence for Pathogenesis From Eye Movements

Xiaohui Cui; Jiuju Wang; Yulin Chang; Mengmeng Su; Hannah T Sherman; Zhaomin Wu; Yufeng Wang; Wei Zhou

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00880

Visual Search in Chinese Children With Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and Comorbid Developmental Dyslexia: Evidence for Pathogenesis From Eye Movements

Front Psychol. 2020 May 20:11:880. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00880. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Xiaohui Cui¹, Jiuju Wang^{2

3}, Yulin Chang¹, Mengmeng Su⁴, Hannah T Sherman⁵, Zhaomin Wu⁶, Yufeng Wang^{2

3}, Wei Zhou¹

Affiliations

¹ Beijing Key Laboratory of Learning and Cognition, School of Psychology, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China.
² Institute of Mental Health, Peking University Sixth Hospital, Beijing, China.
³ National Clinical Research Center for Mental Disorders and Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Ministry of Health, Peking University, Beijing, China.
⁴ College of Elementary Education, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China.
⁵ Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, SC, United States.
⁶ Shenzhen Children's Hospital, Shenzhen, China.

Abstract

In this study, a visual search task was conducted on children with comorbid attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and developmental dyslexia (DD), children with pure ADHD, and typically developing children to explore the pathogenesis of comorbidity between ADHD and DD. Participants searched for the target character from five characters in each trial during the task. The distractors included orthographically similar characters, homophones, unrelated characters, and characters of a different color (i.e., red). Results showed that the clinical groups produced longer first fixation duration than the control group in all types of distractors. Children with ADHD comorbid DD were also more susceptible to characters with the distracting red color in gaze duration and total viewing time than were children with pure ADHD and healthy controls. The implication of comorbidity (ADHD + DD) on the pathogenesis was discussed. These results may be helpful for the diagnosis and treatment of ADHD with comorbid DD.

Keywords: Chinese character; attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder with comorbid developmental dyslexia; eye tracking; pathogenesis; visual search.