ABSTRACT
OBJECTIVES: To examine the performance on the Deese-Roediger-McDermott task of adults divided into ADHD subtypes and compares their performance to that of healthy controls to examine whether adults with ADHD are more susceptible to the production of false memories under experimental conditions. METHOD: A total of 128 adults with ADHD (50% females), classified into three Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; DSM-IV-TR) subtypes, were compared with 48 controls. RESULTS: The results indicated that the ADHD participants recalled and recognized fewer studied words than the controls, the ADHD groups produced more false memories than the control group, no differences in either the false positives or the false negatives. The ADHD-combined (ADHD-CT) group recognized significantly more critical words than the control, ADHD-predominantly inattentive (ADHD-IA), and ADHD-predominantly hyperactive-impulsive (ADHD-HI) groups. The ADHD groups recalled and recognized more false positives, were more confident in their false responses, and displayed more knowledge corruption than the controls. The ADHD-CT group recalled and recognized more false positives than the other ADHD groups. CONCLUSION: The adults with ADHD have more false memories than the controls and that false memory formation varied with the ADHD subtypes.
Subject(s)
Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity/diagnosis , Hyperkinesis/diagnosis , Memory Disorders/etiology , Memory/physiology , Mental Recall , Adult , Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity/epidemiology , Case-Control Studies , Delusions , Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders , Female , Humans , Hyperkinesis/epidemiology , Impulsive Behavior , International Classification of Diseases , Male , Mental Recall/physiology , Neuropsychological Tests , Recognition, Psychology/physiology , Young AdultABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: A large body of research that has investigated substance dependence and working memory (WM) resources, yet no prior study has used a comprehensive test battery to examine the impact of chronic drug dependence on WM as a multi-component system. OBJECTIVES: This study examined the efficiency of several WM components in participants who were chronic drug dependents. In addition, the functioning of the four WM components was compared among dependents of various types of drugs. METHOD: In total, 128 chronic drug dependents participated in this study. Their average age was 38.48 years, and they were classified into four drug-dependence groups. Chronic drug dependents were compared with a 36-participant control group that had a mean age of 37.6 years. A WM test battery that comprised eight tests and that assessed each of four WM components was administered to each participant. RESULTS: Compared with the control group, all four groups of drug dependents had significantly poorer test performance on all of the WM tasks. Among the four groups of drug users, the polydrug group had the poorest performance scores on each of the eight tasks, and the performance scores of the marijuana group were the least affected. Finally, the forward digit span task and the logical memory tasks were less sensitive than other tasks when differentiating between marijuana users and the normal participants. CONCLUSION: The four components of WM are impaired among chronic drug dependents. These results have implications for the development of tools, classification methods and therapeutic strategies for drug dependents.
ABSTRACT
A confirmatory factor analysis was performed to examine the factorial structure of a battery of working memory measures across two Arab cultures (Kuwait and Egypt). The battery of tests was administered to a sample of 384 children: 192 primary-school Kuwaiti children (96 boys, 96 girls; M age = 10.0 yr., SD = 1.0) and 192 primary-school Egyptian children (96 boys, 96 girls; M age = 10.0 yr., SD = 1.2). The multi-group confirmatory factor analysis revealed configural, metric, scalar, and strict invariances across the two cultures. This implies that working memory can be conceptualized similarly by Kuwaiti and Egyptian children and was measured in the same way in both cultures. Both within-groups individual differences and between-groups differences in means reflected differences in the underlying latent construct.
Subject(s)
Memory, Short-Term/physiology , Neuropsychological Tests/standards , Psychometrics/instrumentation , Child , Cross-Cultural Comparison , Egypt , Female , Humans , Kuwait , MaleABSTRACT
Despite its significance, the central executive is the least explored component of working memory, particularly in complicated contexts. Exp. 1 investigated the role of executive control of working memory in situation awareness in a real-life driving simulation. Exp. 2 examined the extent to which taxing the central executive might affect situation awareness. High, Medium, and Low Situation Awareness groups were formed as assessed using the Situation Awareness Global Assessment Technique. Executive function was measured using several tests. Results from Exp. 1 demonstrated that the Low Situation Awareness group performed significantly worse on all executive function tasks compared to High and Medium Situation Awareness groups. Findings from Exp. 2 suggested that concurrent load on the central executive dramatically affected the Low Situation Awareness group but not the High Situation Awareness group: the former had significantly more driving violations under central executive load.
