No Evidence for Inhibitory Deficits or Altered Reward Processing in ADHD

OBJECTIVE: Cognitive and motivational factors differentially affect individuals with mental health problems such as ADHD. Here we introduce a new task to disentangle the relative contribution of inhibitory control and reward anticipation on task performance in children with ADHD and/or autism spectrum disorders (ASD). METHOD: Typically developing children, children with ADHD, ASD, or both disorders worked during separate sessions for monetary or social rewards in go/no-go tasks with varying inhibitory load levels. Participants also completed a monetary temporal discounting (TD) task. RESULTS: As predicted, task performance was sensitive to both the effects of anticipated reward amount and inhibitory load. Reward amount had different effects depending on inhibitory load level. TD correlated with inhibitory control in the ADHD group. CONCLUSION: The integration of the monetary incentive delay and go/no-go paradigms was successful. Surprisingly, there was no evidence of inhibitory control deficits or altered reward anticipation in the clinical groups.