Mor Sasi¹ (), Tair Vizel, Nitzan Shahar, Dominique Lamy; ¹Tel-Aviv University, ²Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel Aviv University

Although "easily distracted" is a core diagnostic criterion for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), its underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. The few studies on ADHD that relied on experimental tasks specially designed to study visual distraction in the general population reported mixed findings. Here, we suggest that failure to consider experience-based suppression, that is, suppression of irrelevant information after repeated exposures, may explain the inconsistent findings. Therefore, we investigated distraction in ADHD while disentangling distraction by novel salient distractors and experience-based suppression of these distractors. Participants searched for a target shape, and a salient color distractor was either present or absent. Its color changed at the beginning of each block. We compared baseline distraction (performance cost on distractor-present versus -absent trials in the first block halves), and feature-based suppression efficiency (reduction of this cost from the first to the second block halves) in participants with ADHD and their controls.

Acknowledgements: Support was provided by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF)