Reliability Of Anti-saccades And Its Relationship With ADHD Symptoms

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a wildly spread disease which always initiated in childhood and prolong to adult stage even the whole life. It is a mental behavior disorder which affects severely to the person’s social, academic, or work life. Since the specific pathology causes remain unknown, the diagnosis of ADHD is always made based on the person’s statement on his/her behavioral symptoms. Factors sun as various comorbidities, reliability of the person’s statement and subjective criterion of the doctor are very likely to cause a misdiagnosis. Numerous researches have found that people with ADHD always suffer from a deficiency in executive function, which is highly correlated with anti-saccade performance. Converging evidence suggests that people with ADHD always have higher error rate, slower reaction and higher reaction time variation in anti-saccade tasks. In this study, we investigated the test-retest reliability of a typical anti-saccade paradigm. We also investigated the test-retest reliability of the ADHD Self-Report Scale and the correlation between anti-saccade and ADHD symptoms. All these measurements were carried on among colleague students. We found that the reliabilities of both the anti-saccade task and the ADHD Self-Report Scale were reasonably high. Although no significant correlations were found between anti-saccades and ADHD symptoms, this could be caused by the bias in sampling participants. Future researches should consider recruit participants with higher variance on the degree of ADHD symptoms.