AUTHOR=Hsu Chia-Fen , Eastwood John D. , Toplak Maggie E. 

TITLE=Differences in Perceived Mental Effort Required and Discomfort during a Working Memory Task between Individuals At-risk And Not At-risk for ADHD

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=8

YEAR=2017

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00407

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00407

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=<p><bold>Objective:</bold> The avoidance of mental effort is a symptom criterion for Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), but the experience of mental effort has received relatively little attention in the empirical study of individuals at-risk for ADHD. We explored a novel method to assess the experience of effort and discomfort during a working memory task in a sample of young adults at-risk and not at-risk for ADHD.</p><p><bold>Method:</bold> A sample of 235 undergraduate students (Mean age = 21.02, 86 males) were included in this study. Based on an ADHD-screener (ASRS), 136 participants met criteria for the ADHD-risk group and 99 were in the non-ADHD risk group.</p><p><bold>Results:</bold> Individuals at-risk for ADHD reported higher mental effort and discomfort than individuals not at-risk for ADHD, even when performance on the working memory task was comparable or statistically controlled. Mental effort required and discomfort were more strongly correlated for at-risk compared to not at-risk participants. Individuals at-risk for ADHD displayed a stronger correlation between mental effort required and actual accuracy, but individuals not at-risk for ADHD displayed a stronger association between perceived accuracy and actual accuracy for the hardest experimental conditions. The most intense moment of effort required predicted retrospective discomfort ratings of the task in the ADHD-risk group, but not in the non-risk group.</p><p><bold>Conclusion:</bold> The subjective experience of <italic>in the moment</italic> mental effort is an important and viable construct that should be more carefully defined and measured. In particular, the experience of effort required (or how taxing a task is) differentiated between individuals at-risk and individuals not at-risk for ADHD in the present study. Whereas previous ADHD research has explored effort exerted, the present work demonstrated that investigating the experience of being mentally taxed might provide a productive line of investigation that could be used to advance our understanding of the cognitive and affective mechanisms underlying the regulation of effort in individuals at-risk of ADHD.</p>