The present study describes experiences associated with parenting children diagnosed with learning disabilities. Parents whose children were diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, dyslexia/language problems, and Asperger syndrome, related to poor performance at school, took part in the study. A qualitative study design was…

Cognitive processes underlying a behavioural outcome (like reading ability) and the impact of familial risk (e.g., for dyslexia) have been studied in isolation. We present a novel design, linking the two avenues. How do familial influences impact on children's cognitive skills, which subsequently underlie reading development? Participants from the…

Adolescent cannabis use is associated with working memory impairment. The present randomized controlled trial assigned adolescents ages 14 to 21 enrolled in cannabis use treatment to receive either working memory training (experimental group) or a control training (control group) as an adjunctive treatment. Cognitive function, drug use, and other…

Background: The attentional blink (AB) phenomenon was used to assess the effect of emotional information on early visual attention in typically developing (TD) children and children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The AB effect is the momentary perceptual unawareness that follows target identification in a rapid serial visual processing…

One of the most common problems in autistic children is split attention. Split attention prevents autism children from being able to focus attention on their learning, and tasks. As a result, it is important to identify how to make autistic individuals focus attention on learning. Considering autistic individuals have higher visual abilities in…

Objective: Classroom- and laboratory-based efforts to study the attentional problems of children with ADHD are incongruent in elucidating attentional deficits; however, none have explored within- or between-minute variability in the classroom attentional processing in children with ADHD. Method: High and low attention groups of ADHD children…

Fifteen autistic and 15 normal Ss were trained to respond to a card containing two visual cues. The children were further tested on the single cues in order to assess whether one or both stimuli had acquired control over their responding. (Editor/RK)

Research conducted at Fels Research Institute and supported in part by grants HD-00868, FR-00222, and FR-05537 from the National Institute of Mental Health.

Objective: To test if visual focusing and mimic display as features of self-regulation in ADHD children show a curvilinear relation to rising methylphenidate (MPH) doses. To test if small dose steps of 2.5mg MPH cause significant changes in behavior. And to test the relation of these features to intellectual performance, parents' ratings, and…

Two studies examined the role played by stimulus affective characteristics in determining children's patterns of visual selection. (Editor)

Objective: Cognitive effects of stimulant medication were investigated in children with mental retardation (MR) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Method: Performance on tasks tapping sustained attention, visual and auditory selective attention, inhibition, and immediate memory was assessed for 24 children (mean age 10.9 years)…

Children (ages 5, 7, and 9 years) and young adults completed two visual attention tasks that required them to make a forced choice identification response to a target shape presented in the center of a computer screen. In the first task (high correlation condition) each target was flanked with the same distracters on 80% of the trials (valid…