Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, Vol. 4, No. 4, 1976
Attention and Distractibility During Reading in Hyperactive Boys David A. Bremer
Central Oahu Community Mental Health Center, Aiea, Oahu, Hawaff John A. Stern 1
Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri
Nonhyperactive and clinically defined hyperactive boys were administered reading tasks under "quiet" and "distracting" conditions. Hyperactive boys were less attentive to task relevant stimuli and more attentive to task irrelevant stimuli than their controls. Our results demonstrate that the previous findings o f inattentiveness among hyperactive boys on laboratory tasks can be generalized to more typical school activities such as reading.
Hyperactivity, or hyperkinesis, has been considered to be an important clinical syndrome found in children described as overactive, inattentive, and distractible (Burks, 1960; Chess, 1960; Stewart, Pitts, Craig, & Dieruff, 1966). Experimental research has resulted in the seemingly contradictory findings that hyperactive children are less attentive, yet not more distractible, than nonhyperactive children. According to Douglas (1973), one should be "cautious about treating failures of attention and distractibility as identical problems, as clinicians and teachers almost invariably seem to do." Although being inattentive to a task may appear to be synonymous with being distracted from it, operational definitions of attention and distractibility have tended to differ with regard to the type of stimulus being studied. Attention has been defined in terms of efficiency of reactions to signal stimuli on laboratory tasks under constant background conditions. Evidence of attentional deficits among hyperactive children has been found on reaction time and vigilance tasks. Slower and more variable reaction times of hyperactive 1Requests for reprints should be sent to Dr. John Stern, Malcolm Bliss Mental Health Center, 1420 Grattan Street, St. Louis, Missouri 63104. 381 9 1976 Plenum Publishing C o r p o r a t i o n , 227 West 17th Street, N e w Y o r k , N . Y . 10011. No Part o f this p u b l i c a t i o n may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without written permission o f the publisher,
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children compared to normal children (Cohen & Douglas, 1972) are thought to result from lapses in attention. Hyperactive children respond to fewer signal stimuli on vigilance tasks (Sykes, Douglas, Weiss, & Minde, 1971; Sykes, Douglas, & Morgenstern, 1973), and failure to detect such signals is suggestive of inattention. Sykes et al. (1971) recommended that "future research must examine behaviors that are more closely related to the actual attentional demands placed on the child in the school setting." Distractibility has been measured by decrements in "task performance as the result of presentation of extraneous, "distracting" stimuli. Sykes et al. (1971) found no deleterious effect of intermittent white noise on hyperactive children's vigilance performance. Distracting color backgrounds in a discrimination task had no differential effect on reaction times of hyperactive and normal children (Sykes et al., 1973). Decreases in speed of color naming in the presence of contradictory cues were no greater among hyperactive children than in controls (Campbell, Douglas, & Morgenstern, 1971). These results are difficult to reconcile with statements by clinicians that distractibility is a cardinal symptom of hyperkinesis (Eisenberg, 1966). Sykes et al. (1973) did find significantly more glances off-task among hyperactive children than among controls. This finding suggests an alternative measure of distractibility in terms of visual responses to distracting stimuli. The present study was designed to determine (a) if attentional deficits of hyperactive children previously demonstrated on laboratory tasks generalize to a typical school task, i.e., reading and (b) if differences between hyperactive and normal children are found in visual attention to distracting stimuli.
METHOD
Subjects Fifteen 9- to 12-year-old hyperactive boys were selected from outpatient mental health services on the basis of three criteria: (a) an impression of overactivity as a prominent symptom, derived from clinical records and/or referral statements, (b) parental ratings of "overactivity" and "always on the move" plus any 6 symptoms from a list of 18 other hyperactive symptoms according to the method of Stewart et al. (1966), and (c) an IQ above 80 on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and a Reading Grade Placement of at least 3.0 on the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT). Two boys who met the above criteria were excluded from the sample because of lack of cooperation and another due to equipment failure. The hyperactive boys were matched closely with nonhyperactive boys on the basis of age (hyperactive and control X = 10 years, 7 months), Peabody IQ (hyperactive .~ = 97.5, control .Y = 96.0), WRAT Reading Grade (hyperactive
Attention and Distractibility During Reading
383
A~ = 5.3, control f f = 5.4), and socioeconomic background (predominately lowincome families, 3 pairs were black and 12 white).
Apparatus Stories at the second (300 words), fourth (500 words), and sixth (900 words) grade levels were selected from materials published by Science Research Associates (1960) and pica typed in uniform style at 20 lines per page. The reading materials were placed on a stand attached to a comfortable chair. Distracting stimuli consisted of (a) a telephone ringing (65db) with flashing lights on the telephone or (b) a sinusoidal oscilloscope display accompanied by a 75-db sound of a Monroe electromechanical calculator performing multiplication operations. Auditory stimuli were taped in random order with 5-second stimulus duration and variable intertrial intervals from 10 to 20 seconds. A sound-sensitive relay activated the corresponding visual stimulus on each trial. Horizontal and vertical electrooculograms were recorded on magnetic tape for subsequent processing by a PDP-12 computer programmed for analysis of eye movements during reading (Hawley, Stern, & Chen, 1974). Onset and offset of distracting stimuli were recorded on a third channel of the magnetic tape. The recording equipment was enclosed in a recording booth equipped with a one.way mirror situated at an angle to the reading chair to eliminate the child's reflection as a distraction.
Procedure Each S was tested individually on one occasion. E explained the recording procedure and reassured the child as electrodes were applied. After electrodes were in place and equipment turned on, E administered the PPVT and WRAT according to standard instructions. Then E said, "I have some stories for you to read silently to yourself." E explained that he would be in the recording booth and could see when S was finished via the one-way mirror. The first story was at the second grade level. After S finished the story, E removed the material, asked S some questions about the story, and presented another second grade story for S to read. Following the initial story, one story at each of the three levels was presented for S to read silently under quiet background conditions. However, Ss whose reading speed on the second grade story was less than 80 words per minute (wpm) were not given a sixth grade level story and Ss who read at 33 to 50 wpm received a short version of the fourth grade story. After S completed the stories in the quiet condition, a similar procedure was followed using an alternate set of second, fourth, and sixth grade stories and the distraction tape was activated while S was reading.
384
Bremer and Stern RESULTS
Reading speeds in the two groups were similar. One boy (hyperactive) read less than 33 wpm and received only second grade level stories; five hyperactive boys and four of the nonhyperactive boys read more than 80 wpm. Differences between the two groups in average time to read a page and average time to read a line were not significant. It had been predicted that as the result of inattentiveness the electrooculograms of hyperactive boys would differ from those of nonhyperactive boys in a number of respects, but no significant differences were found prior to the distraction periods. Variables considered were durations of fixation pauses, variance of fixation pause duration, incidence of exceptionally long or short f'kxations, variability in reading speed, eye-blink frequency, head movement artifacts, and horizontal eye movements away from the printed page, i.e., off-task. In the last comparison it was found that more than half of the nonhyperactive boys were on-task all the time while less than a third of the hyperactive boys were consistently on-task; however, this difference was not statistically significant. The hyperactive group was found to be significantly more reactive to the distracting stimuli than was the nonhyperactive group. Responses to the first 15 distraction stimulus presentations were considered since all Ss were exposed to at least 15 stimuli and some Ss finished reading before the 16th trial. All but one of the boys in each group responded visually (by looking toward the stimulus display) to at least one distraction presentation. The number of stimuli eliciting a response was highly correlated with the total time distracted (rho = .98 in the hyperactive group, rho = .80 in the control group). The number of responses on odd stimulus trials correlated with responses on even trials (rho = .91 for hyperactive, rho = .82 for controls). The telephone and the oscilloscope also were responded to similarly (hyperactive rho = .78, control rho = .60). The median number of stimuli eliciting a response was five in the hyperactive group and four in the control group. This numerically small difference was reliable (p < .05, Wilcoxon matched-pair, signed-ranks test). In terms of the duration of responses to distractions, the median time distracted during the entire series of stimuli was 18 seconds in the hyperactive group and 5 seconds in the control group (p < .05, Wilcoxon matched-pair, signed-ranks test). The average number of children responding per stimulus for three blocks of five stimulus trials is presented in Table I. Trends toward habituation of responses to the distracting stimuli were evaluated by the Friedman two-way analysis of variance by ranks, and the tests were significant (p < .001)for both hyperactive and control groups. Differences between the two groups in rate of habituation were assessed by the Wilcoxon test for significance of interactions which was not significant. Thougn hyperactive boys were significantly
Attention and Distractibility During Reading
385
Table I. Mean Number of Children Distracted Per Trial Trial blocks Group
1 -5
6-10
11-15
Hyperactive Control
10.6 8.2
6.0 3.0
3.8 1.8
more responsive to the distractors, such distractors did not interfere with the aspects of task performance measured. Hyperactive children could, under conditions of no distraction, not be discriminated from their matched controls on any of our measures of eye movements during reading. We therefore conducted a post hoc analysis of one other aspect of reading behavior on the five boys who were most responsive to the distracting stimuli used in this experiment. All five of these boys were members of our "hyperactive" group. The aspect of reading behavior evaluated consisted of indicants that the child had skipped lines during reading. Since each page consisted of 20 typewritten lines, we expected the normal reader to make 19 large regressive eye movements per page to reposition the eyes from the end of one line to the beginning of the next. Eye movement data for all children in the hyperactive group and the five matched controls for the most distractible hyperactive children were evaluated for this analysis. This analysis revealed that four of these five highly distractible boys had skipped at least one-fourth of the reading material presented (prior to the distracting condition). None of their matched controls appeared to have skipped lines. Fisher's exact probability test indicated that the difference between the five distractible boys and their controls was statistically significant (/9 < .05, onetailed). Fisher's test of the difference between the five most distractible and the remaining hyperactive boys, only one of whom had skipped material, was also significant (p < .05).
DISCUSSION
The hypothesis that hyperactive boys have, on the average, more lapses in attention during reading than is true of normal children was not supported by our data. If groups are matched on the basis of age, intelligence, and reading skill level (as measured by the WRAT), no differences in how they go about the task of reading under either nondistracting or distracting conditions are found. In other words, on-task behavior does not discriminate between groups. The hypothesis that hyperactive boys are more readily distracted by extraneous stimuli was supported. Hyperactive boys were more often distracted
386
Bremet and Stern
by the extraneous stimuli used, spent more time looking toward or at the distractors, and the degree of distraction, as rated by an observer (on a 6-point scale), was greater than that of normal boys. Our data thus generally indicate that hyperactive children (matched for age, IQ, and reading skill level) show no attentional deficits while engaged in a reading task where distractors are kept to a minimum. They were, however, significantly more responsive to distractors while reading. We must agree with Douglas (1973) that ,failure in attention and distractibility are not identical problems. Our hyperactive children demonstrated their ability to attend; this of course has been reasonably well documented in studies which have manipulated motivation and demonstrated dramatic improvement in the performance of hyperactive children so manipulated (Worland, North-Jones, & Stern, 1973). Thus in the present study it is not their ability to attend but their ability to inhibit responding to other environmental events that discriminates hyperactive from normal children. If we restrict our analysis to a "select" group of hyperactive boys, namely those most responsive to the distracting stimuli used in phase 2 of our experiment, we do find these boys to be less attentive to the reading task under nondistracting conditions than are either the other hyperactive boys or their matched controls. We thus have at least suggestive evidence that children who are readily distracted are also more inattentive on tasks where there are no external (or at least no obvious external) distractors, inattentiveness here being manifested by the fact that they skipped more lines during reading of text than did less distractible boys. We would concur with the Cromwell, Baumeister, and Hawkins (1963) suggestion that so-called hyperactive children are not necessarily overactive but that their apparent hyperactivity is due principally to their lack of persistence and shifting of activities. Thus, for some authors, especially clinicians, distractibility is an important component of the hyperactive child syndrome. They see hyperactivity as the principal symptom; inferred as a variable important in the manifestation of this behavior is distractibility (Clarkson & Hayden, 1971; Eisenberg, 1966; Fish, 1971; Stewart, Thach, & Freidin, 1970). Unfortunately, much of the experimental literature finds distractors not producing differential effects on normal and hyperactive children. Sykes et al. (1971), for example, found intermittent white noise to have no differential effect on the performance of a vigilance task; Campbell et al. ( 1971 ) found irrelevant peripheral figures to produce no differential effect on a primar2ctask involving color naming. From our study it appears that if one utilizes a well-practiced skill, such as reading, that distractors are differentially responded to by the two groups, with hyperactives responding more than control children. Our findings of nondifferential effects between the two groups on our measures of reading can be attributed to the fact that we selected our control group so that it was
Attention and Distractibility During Reading
387
m a t c h e d on reading level w i t h the hyperactive group. T h o u g h we had h o p e d to find differences in processing strategies (as inferred f r o m eye m o v e m e n t data) b e t w e e n the groups, this did n o t occur.
REFERENCES Burks, H. F. The hyperkinetic child. Exceptional Children, 1960, 27, 18. Campbell, S. B., Douglas, V. I., & Morgenstern, G. Cognitive styles in hyperactive children and the effect of methylphenidate. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 1971, 12, 53-67. Chess, S. Diagnosis and treatment of the hyperactive child. New York State Journal o f Medicine, 1960, 60, 2379-2385. Clarkson, F. E., & Hayden, B. S. A developmental study of perceptual, conceptual, motivational and self-concept differences between and within hyperactive and normal groups of preadolescent boys, Project No. 5-0414, Washington, D.C., U.S. Office of Education, Bureau for the Handicapped, 1971. Cohen, N. J., & Douglas, V. I. Characteristics of the orienting response in hyperactive and normal children. Psychophysiology, 1972, 9, 238-245. Cromwell, R. L., Baumeister, A., & Hawkins, W. F. Research in activity level. In N. R. Ellis (Ed.), Handbook o f mental deficiency. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963. Douglas, V. I. Sustained attention and impulse control: Implications for handicapped children. In J. A. Swets & L. L. Elliott (Eds.), Psychology and the handicapped child, Washington, D.C., U.S. Office of Education, 1973. Eisenberg, L. The management of the hyperkinetic child. Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology, 1966, 8, 593-598. Fish, B. The "one child, one drug" myth of stimulants in hyperkinesis, importance of diagnostic categories in evaluating treatment. Archives o f General Psychiatry, 1971, 25, 193-203. Hawley, T. F., Stern, J. A., & Chen, S. C. Computer analysis of eye movements during reading. Reading World, 1974, 13, 307-317. Stewart, M. A., Pitts, F., Craig, A., & Dieruff, W. The hyperactive child syndrome. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 1966, 36, 861-867. Stewart, M. A., Thach, B. T., & Freidin, M. R. Accidental poisoning and the hyperactive child syndrome. Diseases o f the Nervous System, 1970, 31, 403-417. Sykes, D. H., Douglas, V. I., & Morgenstern, G. Sustained attention in hyperactive children. Journal of ChiM Psychology and Psychiatry,. 1973, 14, 213-220. Sykes, D. H., Douglas, V. I., Weiss, G., & Minde, K. K. Attention in the hyperactive child and the effect of methylphenidate (Ritalin). Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 1971, 12, 129-139. Worland, J., North-Jones, M., & Stern, J. A. Performance and activity of hyperactive and noImal boys as a function of distraction and reward. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 1973, 1, 363-377.
Attention and Distractibility During Reading in Hyperactive Boys David A. Bremer
Central Oahu Community Mental Health Center, Aiea, Oahu, Hawaff John A. Stern 1
Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri
Nonhyperactive and clinically defined hyperactive boys were administered reading tasks under "quiet" and "distracting" conditions. Hyperactive boys were less attentive to task relevant stimuli and more attentive to task irrelevant stimuli than their controls. Our results demonstrate that the previous findings o f inattentiveness among hyperactive boys on laboratory tasks can be generalized to more typical school activities such as reading.
Hyperactivity, or hyperkinesis, has been considered to be an important clinical syndrome found in children described as overactive, inattentive, and distractible (Burks, 1960; Chess, 1960; Stewart, Pitts, Craig, & Dieruff, 1966). Experimental research has resulted in the seemingly contradictory findings that hyperactive children are less attentive, yet not more distractible, than nonhyperactive children. According to Douglas (1973), one should be "cautious about treating failures of attention and distractibility as identical problems, as clinicians and teachers almost invariably seem to do." Although being inattentive to a task may appear to be synonymous with being distracted from it, operational definitions of attention and distractibility have tended to differ with regard to the type of stimulus being studied. Attention has been defined in terms of efficiency of reactions to signal stimuli on laboratory tasks under constant background conditions. Evidence of attentional deficits among hyperactive children has been found on reaction time and vigilance tasks. Slower and more variable reaction times of hyperactive 1Requests for reprints should be sent to Dr. John Stern, Malcolm Bliss Mental Health Center, 1420 Grattan Street, St. Louis, Missouri 63104. 381 9 1976 Plenum Publishing C o r p o r a t i o n , 227 West 17th Street, N e w Y o r k , N . Y . 10011. No Part o f this p u b l i c a t i o n may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without written permission o f the publisher,
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Bremet and Stern
children compared to normal children (Cohen & Douglas, 1972) are thought to result from lapses in attention. Hyperactive children respond to fewer signal stimuli on vigilance tasks (Sykes, Douglas, Weiss, & Minde, 1971; Sykes, Douglas, & Morgenstern, 1973), and failure to detect such signals is suggestive of inattention. Sykes et al. (1971) recommended that "future research must examine behaviors that are more closely related to the actual attentional demands placed on the child in the school setting." Distractibility has been measured by decrements in "task performance as the result of presentation of extraneous, "distracting" stimuli. Sykes et al. (1971) found no deleterious effect of intermittent white noise on hyperactive children's vigilance performance. Distracting color backgrounds in a discrimination task had no differential effect on reaction times of hyperactive and normal children (Sykes et al., 1973). Decreases in speed of color naming in the presence of contradictory cues were no greater among hyperactive children than in controls (Campbell, Douglas, & Morgenstern, 1971). These results are difficult to reconcile with statements by clinicians that distractibility is a cardinal symptom of hyperkinesis (Eisenberg, 1966). Sykes et al. (1973) did find significantly more glances off-task among hyperactive children than among controls. This finding suggests an alternative measure of distractibility in terms of visual responses to distracting stimuli. The present study was designed to determine (a) if attentional deficits of hyperactive children previously demonstrated on laboratory tasks generalize to a typical school task, i.e., reading and (b) if differences between hyperactive and normal children are found in visual attention to distracting stimuli.
METHOD
Subjects Fifteen 9- to 12-year-old hyperactive boys were selected from outpatient mental health services on the basis of three criteria: (a) an impression of overactivity as a prominent symptom, derived from clinical records and/or referral statements, (b) parental ratings of "overactivity" and "always on the move" plus any 6 symptoms from a list of 18 other hyperactive symptoms according to the method of Stewart et al. (1966), and (c) an IQ above 80 on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and a Reading Grade Placement of at least 3.0 on the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT). Two boys who met the above criteria were excluded from the sample because of lack of cooperation and another due to equipment failure. The hyperactive boys were matched closely with nonhyperactive boys on the basis of age (hyperactive and control X = 10 years, 7 months), Peabody IQ (hyperactive .~ = 97.5, control .Y = 96.0), WRAT Reading Grade (hyperactive
Attention and Distractibility During Reading
383
A~ = 5.3, control f f = 5.4), and socioeconomic background (predominately lowincome families, 3 pairs were black and 12 white).
Apparatus Stories at the second (300 words), fourth (500 words), and sixth (900 words) grade levels were selected from materials published by Science Research Associates (1960) and pica typed in uniform style at 20 lines per page. The reading materials were placed on a stand attached to a comfortable chair. Distracting stimuli consisted of (a) a telephone ringing (65db) with flashing lights on the telephone or (b) a sinusoidal oscilloscope display accompanied by a 75-db sound of a Monroe electromechanical calculator performing multiplication operations. Auditory stimuli were taped in random order with 5-second stimulus duration and variable intertrial intervals from 10 to 20 seconds. A sound-sensitive relay activated the corresponding visual stimulus on each trial. Horizontal and vertical electrooculograms were recorded on magnetic tape for subsequent processing by a PDP-12 computer programmed for analysis of eye movements during reading (Hawley, Stern, & Chen, 1974). Onset and offset of distracting stimuli were recorded on a third channel of the magnetic tape. The recording equipment was enclosed in a recording booth equipped with a one.way mirror situated at an angle to the reading chair to eliminate the child's reflection as a distraction.
Procedure Each S was tested individually on one occasion. E explained the recording procedure and reassured the child as electrodes were applied. After electrodes were in place and equipment turned on, E administered the PPVT and WRAT according to standard instructions. Then E said, "I have some stories for you to read silently to yourself." E explained that he would be in the recording booth and could see when S was finished via the one-way mirror. The first story was at the second grade level. After S finished the story, E removed the material, asked S some questions about the story, and presented another second grade story for S to read. Following the initial story, one story at each of the three levels was presented for S to read silently under quiet background conditions. However, Ss whose reading speed on the second grade story was less than 80 words per minute (wpm) were not given a sixth grade level story and Ss who read at 33 to 50 wpm received a short version of the fourth grade story. After S completed the stories in the quiet condition, a similar procedure was followed using an alternate set of second, fourth, and sixth grade stories and the distraction tape was activated while S was reading.
384
Bremer and Stern RESULTS
Reading speeds in the two groups were similar. One boy (hyperactive) read less than 33 wpm and received only second grade level stories; five hyperactive boys and four of the nonhyperactive boys read more than 80 wpm. Differences between the two groups in average time to read a page and average time to read a line were not significant. It had been predicted that as the result of inattentiveness the electrooculograms of hyperactive boys would differ from those of nonhyperactive boys in a number of respects, but no significant differences were found prior to the distraction periods. Variables considered were durations of fixation pauses, variance of fixation pause duration, incidence of exceptionally long or short f'kxations, variability in reading speed, eye-blink frequency, head movement artifacts, and horizontal eye movements away from the printed page, i.e., off-task. In the last comparison it was found that more than half of the nonhyperactive boys were on-task all the time while less than a third of the hyperactive boys were consistently on-task; however, this difference was not statistically significant. The hyperactive group was found to be significantly more reactive to the distracting stimuli than was the nonhyperactive group. Responses to the first 15 distraction stimulus presentations were considered since all Ss were exposed to at least 15 stimuli and some Ss finished reading before the 16th trial. All but one of the boys in each group responded visually (by looking toward the stimulus display) to at least one distraction presentation. The number of stimuli eliciting a response was highly correlated with the total time distracted (rho = .98 in the hyperactive group, rho = .80 in the control group). The number of responses on odd stimulus trials correlated with responses on even trials (rho = .91 for hyperactive, rho = .82 for controls). The telephone and the oscilloscope also were responded to similarly (hyperactive rho = .78, control rho = .60). The median number of stimuli eliciting a response was five in the hyperactive group and four in the control group. This numerically small difference was reliable (p < .05, Wilcoxon matched-pair, signed-ranks test). In terms of the duration of responses to distractions, the median time distracted during the entire series of stimuli was 18 seconds in the hyperactive group and 5 seconds in the control group (p < .05, Wilcoxon matched-pair, signed-ranks test). The average number of children responding per stimulus for three blocks of five stimulus trials is presented in Table I. Trends toward habituation of responses to the distracting stimuli were evaluated by the Friedman two-way analysis of variance by ranks, and the tests were significant (p < .001)for both hyperactive and control groups. Differences between the two groups in rate of habituation were assessed by the Wilcoxon test for significance of interactions which was not significant. Thougn hyperactive boys were significantly
Attention and Distractibility During Reading
385
Table I. Mean Number of Children Distracted Per Trial Trial blocks Group
1 -5
6-10
11-15
Hyperactive Control
10.6 8.2
6.0 3.0
3.8 1.8
more responsive to the distractors, such distractors did not interfere with the aspects of task performance measured. Hyperactive children could, under conditions of no distraction, not be discriminated from their matched controls on any of our measures of eye movements during reading. We therefore conducted a post hoc analysis of one other aspect of reading behavior on the five boys who were most responsive to the distracting stimuli used in this experiment. All five of these boys were members of our "hyperactive" group. The aspect of reading behavior evaluated consisted of indicants that the child had skipped lines during reading. Since each page consisted of 20 typewritten lines, we expected the normal reader to make 19 large regressive eye movements per page to reposition the eyes from the end of one line to the beginning of the next. Eye movement data for all children in the hyperactive group and the five matched controls for the most distractible hyperactive children were evaluated for this analysis. This analysis revealed that four of these five highly distractible boys had skipped at least one-fourth of the reading material presented (prior to the distracting condition). None of their matched controls appeared to have skipped lines. Fisher's exact probability test indicated that the difference between the five distractible boys and their controls was statistically significant (/9 < .05, onetailed). Fisher's test of the difference between the five most distractible and the remaining hyperactive boys, only one of whom had skipped material, was also significant (p < .05).
DISCUSSION
The hypothesis that hyperactive boys have, on the average, more lapses in attention during reading than is true of normal children was not supported by our data. If groups are matched on the basis of age, intelligence, and reading skill level (as measured by the WRAT), no differences in how they go about the task of reading under either nondistracting or distracting conditions are found. In other words, on-task behavior does not discriminate between groups. The hypothesis that hyperactive boys are more readily distracted by extraneous stimuli was supported. Hyperactive boys were more often distracted
386
Bremet and Stern
by the extraneous stimuli used, spent more time looking toward or at the distractors, and the degree of distraction, as rated by an observer (on a 6-point scale), was greater than that of normal boys. Our data thus generally indicate that hyperactive children (matched for age, IQ, and reading skill level) show no attentional deficits while engaged in a reading task where distractors are kept to a minimum. They were, however, significantly more responsive to distractors while reading. We must agree with Douglas (1973) that ,failure in attention and distractibility are not identical problems. Our hyperactive children demonstrated their ability to attend; this of course has been reasonably well documented in studies which have manipulated motivation and demonstrated dramatic improvement in the performance of hyperactive children so manipulated (Worland, North-Jones, & Stern, 1973). Thus in the present study it is not their ability to attend but their ability to inhibit responding to other environmental events that discriminates hyperactive from normal children. If we restrict our analysis to a "select" group of hyperactive boys, namely those most responsive to the distracting stimuli used in phase 2 of our experiment, we do find these boys to be less attentive to the reading task under nondistracting conditions than are either the other hyperactive boys or their matched controls. We thus have at least suggestive evidence that children who are readily distracted are also more inattentive on tasks where there are no external (or at least no obvious external) distractors, inattentiveness here being manifested by the fact that they skipped more lines during reading of text than did less distractible boys. We would concur with the Cromwell, Baumeister, and Hawkins (1963) suggestion that so-called hyperactive children are not necessarily overactive but that their apparent hyperactivity is due principally to their lack of persistence and shifting of activities. Thus, for some authors, especially clinicians, distractibility is an important component of the hyperactive child syndrome. They see hyperactivity as the principal symptom; inferred as a variable important in the manifestation of this behavior is distractibility (Clarkson & Hayden, 1971; Eisenberg, 1966; Fish, 1971; Stewart, Thach, & Freidin, 1970). Unfortunately, much of the experimental literature finds distractors not producing differential effects on normal and hyperactive children. Sykes et al. (1971), for example, found intermittent white noise to have no differential effect on the performance of a vigilance task; Campbell et al. ( 1971 ) found irrelevant peripheral figures to produce no differential effect on a primar2ctask involving color naming. From our study it appears that if one utilizes a well-practiced skill, such as reading, that distractors are differentially responded to by the two groups, with hyperactives responding more than control children. Our findings of nondifferential effects between the two groups on our measures of reading can be attributed to the fact that we selected our control group so that it was
Attention and Distractibility During Reading
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m a t c h e d on reading level w i t h the hyperactive group. T h o u g h we had h o p e d to find differences in processing strategies (as inferred f r o m eye m o v e m e n t data) b e t w e e n the groups, this did n o t occur.
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