Memory, Planification and Attention in Children with Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity

«Memory, planification and attention in children with attention deficit and hyperactivity desorder»

Helene Poissant

UQAM, DSÉ Montréal, P.Q. Canada, H3C 3P8

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In this paper we look at different kind of evidence: neurobiological, neuropsychological and medical and argue that individuals with ADHD may experience a lack of metacognition. Metacognition relates to the consciousness that individuals have about their own thinking processes and to the ability to have control of those processes (Vygotsky, 1934/1962). As a component of the metacognitive system, metacognitive knowledge may be used in four different ways: (1) a person may know when she/he knows (self-consciousness) or do not know when she/he does not know (secondary ignorance), (2) a person may know what she/he knows, which can help her/him to predict her/his abilities to succeed in a given task and to estimate her/his confidence in the outcome, (3) a person may know what she/he needs to know (Markman, 1977) to fill in her/his lack of information (perception of lack of information) or the inconsistencies in a given information (perception of inconsistencies of information), and finally, (4) a person may know the usefulness of some strategies for dealing with a given task, e.g., self-questioning Brown (1978, 1987). Another more dynamic aspect of metacognition is self-regulation. This relates to experience, feelings, and thoughts that occur during an ongoing cognitive activity (Flavell, 1979). Those experiences give individuals an internal feedback about the efficiency of their mental monitoring. Self-regulation can intervene in a cognitive activity without the person’s awareness. However, in some circumstances, adults, and to a lesser extent children, are able to consciously use rules and strategies to solve a problem. On the other hand, individuals with ADHD show an inability to “stop and think” before acting, regardless of the task or the situation. The three major aspects of ADHD are hyperactivity, impulsiveness, and inattentiveness. Moreover, these features appear early in childhood for most individuals with an onset often before seven years of age and are marked by chronic behaviors lasting at least six months. For reasons that we will expose in this paper, we assume that ADHD children may experience difficulty engaging in a reflexive activity such as metacognition.