Neuropsychological Measures which Discriminate Among Adults with Residual Symptoms of Attention Deficit Disorder and Other Attentional Complaints

Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) in children is accompanied by quantifiable deficits on attentional, learning, and memory indices. Symptoms of childhood ADD persist into adulthood in many cases. However, many adults without a history of childhood ADD also complain of difficulties with attention, presumably due to other etiologies than developmental ADD. This study investigated whether performance on neuropsychological measures of attention and memory could differentiate adults with attentional complaints and history of childhood ADD from those without childhood ADD. Adults with a history of childhood ADD demonstrated reduced scores on the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Task and Delayed Free Recall on the California Verbal Learning Test as well as on a verbal fluency task relative to adults who denied attentional problems in childhood. Discriminant function analysis using verbal fluency, performance on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, verbal learning and recall, Digit Span Backward, and performance on the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Task as predictors correctly classified adults with and without a history of childhood ADD into diagnostic groups with 75% accuracy.