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
Semester of Graduation
Spring
Degree Name
Doctor of Audiology (AuD)
Department
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders
First Advisor
Lincoln Gray
Second Advisor
Melissa Garber
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.
