Recent research published in attention disorders journal Our findings suggest that children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder perceive their effort on cognitive tasks differently than typically developing children. Specifically, children with this condition report trying less hard on a variety of brain-teasing activities, even though they do not rate the activities as more difficult. This provides evidence that self-reported effort may provide useful insight into the everyday challenges faced by children with disabilities.
Metacognition refers to a person’s ability to monitor and regulate their own thought processes. If you’ve ever noticed that your mind wandered and you needed to reread a paragraph, you used metacognition to assess your focus and change your approach.
Previous research has shown that children with attention disorders often have lower scores on cognitive tests. These tests typically measure executive function, which are the mental skills needed to pay attention, follow rules, and control impulses. However, the researchers wanted to know how these children subjectively experience these mental trainings in real time.
“There is a large body of literature showing that children with ADHD often perform differently than typically developing children on cognitive tasks, particularly those involving attention, intellectual ability, and executive function. However, far fewer studies have examined metacognitive monitoring, or subjective judgments about task progress, in relation to actual performance on these tasks,” said study author Adrian Torres Tacchino, a graduate student at York University.
“The methods used in this study provide a different approach to understanding how children with ADHD evaluate their performance, building on the metacognition and meta-reasoning literature. There is already literature showing that this is a pattern commonly referred to as positive illusory bias (PIB).The current study extends this research by investigating how children with ADHD perceive task difficulty and how much they feel they struggle with cognitive tasks.
To investigate this, researchers recruited 80 children between the ages of 8 and 12. This group included 38 children with a formal diagnosis of attention disorder and 42 neurotypical children without attention disorder. Both groups had similar average intelligence scores and a similar age spread.
To test their mental processes, children completed four different cognitive activities. The first activity was a simple intelligence test that measured verbal and nonverbal reasoning. The second was a mental flexibility activity in which children had to alternately connect numbers and letters in a circle in a specific order.
The third activity is an interference control test. This required children to name the color of ink in which the word was printed rather than reading the written word itself, testing their ability to filter out distracting information. Finally, the children completed an unstructured activity consisting of simple calculations, reading, and copying questions.
Items regarding unstructured activities were scattered randomly on a large piece of paper, and the examiner gave little direction on how to proceed. This special setting was designed to see how children perform when they have to organize their progress without clear rules. Immediately after completing each of the four activities, children answered two questions about their experience.
They used photos of people carrying light or heavy boxes to help them judge how difficult they found the activity to be on a 5-point scale. They also rated how hard they tried on a separate 5-point scale.
The researchers found that children with ADHD reported putting less effort into activities compared to typically developing children. This low effort rating was consistent across all four types of activities. Even in unstructured activities and on standard intelligence tests, children with the condition felt they were not trying as hard as other children. At the same time, the two groups of children showed no differences in overall activity difficulty.
Children with ADHD rated activity difficulty equally as the neurotypical group. Both groups agreed that the interference control activity, which required ignoring written words to describe the color of the ink, was the most difficult and required the most effort. The lack of differences in ratings of task difficulty between the two groups may be partially explained by a phenomenon known as positive illusory bias.
This is the tendency for people with ADHD to underestimate their own difficulties and evaluate their performance more favorably than objective tests would suggest. Relatedly, children with this condition may downplay how challenging the task is, even if their actual performance indicates they are struggling. Scientists have also noticed patterns in how children rate their experiences on various tests.
Children’s ratings of how hard they worked tended to be similar across all four activities. This suggests that children’s amount of effort is a stable individual characteristic and may reflect children’s general motivation and willingness to engage. In contrast, children’s ratings of activity difficulty varied across tests. This provides evidence that perceived difficulty is associated with the specific demands of each unique activity rather than with a general mindset.
The researchers noted that these findings support the idea that perceiving task difficulty and choosing to exert effort are two completely separate mental processes.
“One thing that stands out is that different types of subjective ratings may capture important different aspects of metacognitive monitoring,” Torres told PsyPost. “For example, ratings of effort and task difficulty were largely unrelated to each other. Children may say that the task was not particularly difficult but still report that they worked very hard, and vice versa. This suggests that not only are there important differences between subjective ratings and objective performance, but there may also be important differences between the different types of subjective ratings themselves.”
Researchers also found that a child’s actual performance generally had little to do with how hard they felt they had worked. Getting a high score doesn’t mean your child feels like they worked hard. This discrepancy suggests that self-report assessments capture unique aspects of children’s experiences that are completely missed by traditional test scores.
“The key takeaway is that children with ADHD’s subjective ratings of effort on cognitive tasks may tell us important things that performance scores and informant reports alone cannot capture,” Torres said.
Although these findings provide useful insights, there are several limitations that should be considered when interpreting the data. This study is based on a single subjective assessment made at the end of each activity. Having children rate their effort multiple times during a test may provide a more accurate picture of their attentional fluctuations.
Another limitation is the demographic composition of the participants. Because the sample of children with this condition was primarily male, it is difficult to know whether the findings apply to girls as well. Research shows that girls with the condition often experience more internalized symptoms, such as low self-esteem, which can change how they judge their efforts and performance. Future research may benefit from investigating whether children underreport their effort as a self-defense mechanism.
“We don’t want readers to interpret this finding to mean that children with ADHD are simply unmotivated or aren’t trying,” Torres said. “Rather, we hope that these findings will be interpreted as showing that children with ADHD can provide useful subjective information about how they experience cognitive tasks. This is important because their own perspectives may provide insights that are not captured by performance scores alone. Possible Interpretations One is that sustained mental effort may be particularly difficult or aversive for some children with ADHD. That idea is consistent with the DSM-5-TR description of ADHD, which includes “frequently avoiding, disliking, or being reluctant to engage in tasks that require sustained mental effort.” Please try. ”
“We hope this study will encourage further empirical research on subjective ratings as a way to assess metacognitive monitoring in relation to cognitive task performance in children with ADHD. This approach may provide useful information for researchers and clinicians seeking to better understand how children with ADHD engage in cognitive and academic tasks, including in structured testing environments and classrooms.”
The study, “Metacognitive Assessment of Cognitive Tasks: Differences in Ratings of Task Difficulty and Effort in ADHD and Neurotypical Children,” was authored by Adrian P. Torres and Maggie E. Toplak.
