Límites en la capacidad de procesamiento y déficit atencional en niños hiperactivos

The study of attentional deficit in hyperactive children has been approached from traditional attentional theory. Theories on processing capacity limits are studied here by means of a visual and auditory dual task paradigm. The level of difficulty of the secondary task is manipulated and its effect on hyperactive (=28) and control (n=28) groups of children from grades 2-3 and 4-6 is studied. The results show that when the difficulty of the secondary task is increased hyperactive children from grades 4-6 perform worse than controls, while the opposite occurs with subjects from grades 2-3. Hyperactives show greater instability and weakness in the allocation of resources and/or in their processing capacity limits