# Psychological and neural mechanisms of social-cognitive deficits in ADHD

> **NIH NIH R21** · INDIANA UNIVERSITY INDIANAPOLIS · 2022 · $237,750

## Abstract

Project Summary
Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is prevalent during early and middle childhood, causing
substantial disruptions to everyday life of afflicted children, along with their peers and parents. While primarily
recognized as an executive functioning disorder, there are substantial social-cognitive deficits in youth with
ADHD that can further disrupt the child's development in key areas such as empathy, emotion recognition, and
theory of mind. These impairments are often exacerbated in youth with ADHD and comorbid oppositional
defiant disorder (ODD), who demonstrate a variety of defiant, aggressive, and hostile behaviors. The degree to
which social-cognitive deficits in youth with ADHD represent a distinct impairment is unclear: an inability to
attend to social cues may drive deficits in social cognition. While attention problems are related to social
deficits, we do not know whether executive dysfunction is specifically driving social cognition problems.
Moreover, while neuroimaging research of ADHD has largely revealed prefrontal dysfunction and delayed
white matter maturation, very little research has examined brain function during social cognitive processing.
To fill these research gaps, this investigation will employ virtual reality (VR) and neuroimaging with three
matched groups of youth in middle childhood (ages 9-12): typical developing youth, youth with ADHD but no
comorbid ODD (ADHD-ODD), and youth with ADHD and comorbid ODD (ADHD+ODD). We will build upon
our ongoing VR and neuroimaging research to examine how removing background audio and visual stimuli in
realistic scenes modifies social cognitive skills in youth with ADHD. We will measure empathy, hostility biases,
and emotion recognition during virtual scenes with distinct levels of audiovisual background stimuli that may
draw attention away from social cues. Subsequently, during fMRI, we will examine how social brain circuitry is
impacted by the removal of visual distracters during empathic decision making. With this design, we strive to
achieve the following specific aims: to examine whether decreasing background distractions in a naturalistic
virtual environment is related to social cognition in youth with ADHD-ODD and ADHD+ODD (Aim 1); and to
characterize, in youth with ADHD-ODD and ADHD+ODD, how brain mechanisms underlying empathic
decision making are impacted by visual interference and how white matter microstructure is associated with
cognitive and emotional empathy (Aim 2). We hypothesize that decreasing levels of background audiovisual
stimuli will improve attention to social cues in youth with ADHD, improving measures of social cognition and
engagement of social brain regions in both youth with ADHD-ODD and ADHD+ODD. This would indicate that
an inability to properly attend to social cues is driving social cognition deficits. However, if attention deficits
are not driving social impairments in youth with ADHD+ODD, removing distracters will have littl...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10372479
- **Project number:** 1R21MH126165-01A1
- **Recipient organization:** INDIANA UNIVERSITY INDIANAPOLIS
- **Principal Investigator:** Thomas A Hummer
- **Activity code:** R21 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $237,750
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2022-07-01 → 2024-05-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10372479

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10372479, Psychological and neural mechanisms of social-cognitive deficits in ADHD (1R21MH126165-01A1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10372479. Licensed CC0.

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