Atypical Processing of Gaze Cues and Faces Explains Comorbidity between Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
Madeleine J Groom, Puja Kochhar, Antonia Hamilton and 3 others
PMID 28255758WHAT IT FOUND
Children with autism, with or without ADHD, had atypical brain responses to faces and gaze cues.
ADHD alone did not change these brain responses, but children with ADHD were slower to respond, especially when the cue did not point to the target.
Key findings
01The pattern of early brain responses to gaze and arrow cues differed by ASD status: children without ASD showed the response mainly for arrow cues, while children with ASD showed a similar response to both cue types.
02ASD, not ADHD, was linked to a smaller right-side brain response to faces and to loss of the usual right-side face advantage.
03ADHD was linked to slower button-press responses overall and a larger difference between valid and invalid cues, but not to the gaze-cue or face brain-response differences.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The groups were small: 12 children with ADHD, 10 children with ASD, 13 children with ADHD plus ASD, and 20 controls. The main gaze-cue brain finding was not predicted and the authors say it needs replication before firm conclusions. The link between autism symptom scores and one gaze-cue brain measure was too weak to survive the paper's correction for testing several measures. The ADHD plus ASD group had lower IQ than controls, and IQ differed across groups, which could affect task performance. Only 16 of the 35 clinical participants completed the ADOS observation, so diagnosis relied partly on parent interview and clinical review. The study used laboratory tasks and EEG, not everyday communication or therapy outcomes.
Declared interests
The supplied text states the funder was the Waterloo Foundation. It does not give other conflict-of-interest statements.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the atypical gaze and face brain responses as an ADHD-specific social-cognition deficit. Those brain differences were associated with ASD status, not ADHD status. The ADHD-related finding was slower reaction times, especially to invalid cues.