UC Santa Barbara

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a highly prevalent cognitive disorder with detrimental personal, social, vocational, and academic outcomes. Research paradigms at the intersection of media design and neuroimaging enable researchers to build understanding regarding the neural and cognitive mechanisms involved in ADHD during naturalistic tasks, and to create more effective clinical interventions. Extant work suggests ADHD-related cognitive performance differences are magnified under cognitive load, and minimized under perceptual load, but the neural mechanisms that undergird these effects have yet to be examined. In three studies—two behavioral and one brain imaging—we show that cognitive load and perceptual load differentially influence both task performance and functional connectivity in an ADHD-specific fashion. Cognitive load was found to result in reduced performance, greater reaction time variability (RTV), and reduced global brain network efficiency in individuals with ADHD. In contrast, perceptual load led to greater performance and reduced RTV in ADHD relative to non-ADHD individuals. Furthermore, results indicate that perceptual load eliminates differences in global brain network efficiency between ADHD and non-ADHD groups.