How Do ADHD Symptoms Affect the Felt Strain of Hard Mental Tasks?
College students at risk for ADHD find challenging mental tasks more exhausting and uncomfortable than peers, even when their actual task performance is taken into account.
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Differences in Perceived Mental Effort Required and Discomfort during a Working Memory Task between Individuals At-risk And Not At-risk for ADHD
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How Do ADHD Symptoms Affect the Felt Strain of Hard Mental Tasks?
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235 participants
A sample of 235 participants (Mean age = 21.02, SD = 5.69, 86 males) was selected for inclusion in this study from a larger sample of 431 university undergraduate students (mean age: 20.59, SD : 4.97, age range: 17–55, female: 68%) who participated in a larger study for course credit.
30 participants
Data from 30 participants were excluded from the analyses for the following reasons: participants failed the practice trials on the working memory task, participants were deemed to be outliers due to excessively poor performance on the working memory task (i.e., accuracy at any block was more than three standard deviations away from the mean of the blocks with the same difficulty) or participants had incomplete or missing data.
What they did
Researchers screened 431 university students and selected 235 participants, categorizing 136 as at-risk for ADHD and 99 as not at-risk based on a self-report symptom checklist. Participants completed a challenging computerized math and working memory task where they repeatedly added sequences of numbers. Throughout the task, participants rated their current levels of mental effort and physical discomfort, and afterwards, they retrospectively rated their overall memory of the task's strain.
What they found
The at-risk group reported significantly higher mental effort and discomfort during the task, and recalled the task as more unpleasant afterwards, even after researchers statistically controlled for actual performance accuracy. Additionally, for the at-risk group, peak moments of experienced effort strongly predicted their overall memories of task discomfort. Performance accuracy was also lower for the at-risk group on medium and hard math conditions, and their feelings of strain were more tightly linked to how poorly they performed.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Because this study evaluated university students using a screening tool rather than a clinical interview, these findings may not apply to clinically diagnosed individuals or the broader public. The proportion of at-risk individuals in the sample was 31.6 percent, which is much higher than the typical diagnostic prevalence of about 11 percent. Furthermore, the correlational nature of the ratings means we cannot determine if feeling discomfort causes poorer performance or if experiencing struggling performance directly causes the discomfort.
Key terms
- Working Memory
- The cognitive system responsible for temporarily holding and manipulating information in our minds.
- ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS)
- A brief screening survey used to assess the frequency of adult attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms.
- Peak-End Effect
- A cognitive bias where people judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its most intense point and at its end, rather than the average of the whole experience.
- Real-Time Rating
- A subjective measurement taken in the moment during a task rather than remembered later.
- Retrospective Evaluation
- An assessment of an experience that is made after the entire event has been completed.
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Common questions
Why didn't researchers just use participants with an official ADHD diagnosis?
Recruiting from a general university population allows researchers to study a wide spectrum of subclinical attention issues easily, though future work must replicate this in clinical populations.
Did the two groups differ in general intelligence?
No, both groups completed a non-verbal reasoning test (Raven's Progressive Matrices) and there was no significant difference in their average scores.
Does this mean people with ADHD symptoms can't perform as well on working memory tasks?
While the at-risk group performed significantly worse on medium and hard tasks, there was no difference in accuracy on the easy tasks, and their subjective feelings of high effort remained even when accounting for accuracy differences.
What is the difference between 'how hard I tried' and 'how taxed I felt'?
'How hard I tried' measures the personal motivation and volitional energy a participant puts in, while 'how taxed I felt' measures the heavy burden the task imposes on the participant's system.
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