Assessing selective attention abilities in ADHD, highly creative, and normal young children via Stroop interference and negative priming effects

Selective attention is conventionally taken to indicate the selection of one set of sensory inputs over others. The selection of relevant over irrelevant stimuli is fundamental for efficient interaction with the visual world. Such interaction relies on selection mechanisms that allow for the direction of action to behaviourally relevant items. Attention is influenced by both stimulus-driven (bottom-up) and goal-directed (top-down) processes. According to one view of selective attention, along with the enhancement of selected targeted information, there is a screening-out or gating of unwanted, competing non-target stimuli (e.g., Cohen, Dunbar, & McClelland, 1990; Desimone & Duncan, 1995). An alternative view regarding such non-targets holds that they are not simply screened out, but implicitly regis-tered and subjected to active inhibition (see Tipper, 2001, for a review). The current study looks for evidence of active inhibition in groups of children with potential differences relating to attentional processing. The active inhibition view can be traced to the seminal work of Dalrymple-Alford and Budayr (1966) using Stroop stimuli. Stroop tasks typify a class of interference effects whereby the introduction of task-irrelevant stimulus char-acteristics slows reaction time. In Stroop interference tasks the naming of hues is slowed by the presence of a word that consists of a task-irrelevant colour name that differs from the ink colour of the task-relevant target stimulus. For example, it takes longer to say 'red' to a red-coloured word when the word is incongruent (e.g., green), than if it consists of a neutral stimulus comprising random letters (e.g., iiiii).