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. 2025 Jun;5(2):100263.
doi: 10.1016/j.ynirp.2025.100263. Epub 2025 Apr 14.

Exploring the neural basis of reaction time variability in ADHD: The importance of examining data at the trial level

Affiliations

Exploring the neural basis of reaction time variability in ADHD: The importance of examining data at the trial level

Leanne Tamm et al. Neuroimage Rep. 2025 Jun.

Abstract

Patients with ADHD evidence elevated reaction time variability (RTV) due to periodic long reaction times (RTs). Even though reaction time variability (RTV) reflects intraindividual differences in RT across time, prior research exploring the neural basis of RTV in ADHD has primarily examined associations between neural activation and summary RTV outcomes (e.g., standard deviation of reaction time, tau). Here, we explore group differences in the neural basis of RTV by examining association between trial-level RTs and fMRI BOLD activation obtained during a Stop Signal Task in a large (n = 5719) sample of 9- to 10-year-old children participating in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. Children with ADHD demonstrated greater RTV than those without ADHD. ADHD-related group differences were not observed between fMRI BOLD activation and summary RTV outcomes. At the trial level, longer RTs were associated with increased BOLD activation in salience/ventral attention and executive control networks and decreased BOLD activation in the default mode network, consistent with time-on-task effects (i.e., stimulus processing time) in which long RTs require maintaining task-positive activation and DMN suppression for more time than short RTs. Moreover, children with ADHD showed weaker associations between long RTs and BOLD activation in these regions than children without ADHD supporting models that point to dysregulated competition between the DMN and executive network as mechanism of cognitive impairment in ADHD.

Keywords: Intraindividual variability; Reaction time variability; Trial-by-trial.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Associations, expressed as Cohen's d effect sizes, between the reaction time variability metric standard deviation of reaction time (SDRT) and BOLD activation for the contrast correct-go vs. fixation across all participants.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Cohen's d effect sizes of the within subjects BOLD-z-score association for the full sample.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Weights of the first component in the BOLD-z-score PCA. Note: A region with a greater magnitude weight contributes more strongly to the pattern of BOLD-z-score associations that explains 17 % of the observed variance. Positive and negative weights indicate relatively higher and lower activation with increasing RTs, respectively. This pattern of BOLD-z-score associations encapsulates the competition between the DMN and task-positive networks, where longer RTs result in task-positive regions being engaged longer and the DMN being suppressed longer. ADHD participants had significantly lower component scores, indicating that this pattern of BOLD-z-score associations was weaker in this group compared to controls, suggesting the competition between the DMN and executive network is dysregulated in ADHD.

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