“Neur-aud-diversity”: Young adults with ADHD are more impulsive and can be accurately selected from their neurotypical peers using false alarm rates in masked and unmasked auditory tasks

Authors

Katelyn Hobbs, James Madison UniversityFollow

Preferred Name

Kate Hobbs

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Date of Graduation

5-9-2024

Degree Name

Doctor of Audiology (AuD)

Department

Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders

Second Advisor

Yingjiu Nie

Third Advisor

Melissa Garber

Abstract

Objective diagnostic measures are desired for those with ADHD (attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder) to overcome current subjective measures. Listeners with ADHD are more impulsive than their neurotypical peers (those without a neurological disorder). Greater impulsivity can lead to lower thresholds on an informational masking task. It was hypothesized that people with ADHD would have lower thresholds on an informational masking task, however, no significant difference was found between the groups’ thresholds (t ₄₀=.49, p=.62, Cohen d=.16). A significant difference was found when comparing the initial false alarm rates from the long testing period with the final false alarm rates (p=.035, Wilcoxon W = 468) and an ROC curve was created using the false alarm rates from the final two of eight challenging and distracting informational masking tasks (d’=2.44, sensitivity=.96, specificity=.25, χ²₁=5.2, p=.022). This test statistic requires a long testing period and is a limitation of the method.