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Impaired spatial working memory in adults with attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder: comparisons with performance in adults with borderline personality disorder and in control subjects
Author(s) -
Dowson J. H.,
McLean A.,
Bazanis E.,
Toone B.,
Young S.,
Robbins T. W.,
Sahakian B. J.
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
acta psychiatrica scandinavica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.849
H-Index - 146
eISSN - 1600-0447
pISSN - 0001-690X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0447.2004.00292.x
Subject(s) - borderline personality disorder , working memory , psychology , attention deficit hyperactivity disorder , executive functions , neuropsychology , affect (linguistics) , clinical psychology , analysis of variance , audiology , psychiatry , cognition , medicine , communication
Objective: This study investigated a previous claim that working memory may be ‘particularly impaired’ in adult attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), compared with other psychiatric disorders which affect frontal lobe‐mediated executive functions. Method: Performance on spatial working memory (SWM) and two additional tasks were investigated for adult patients selected on the basis of DSM‐IV ADHD ( n = 19), adult patients selected on the basis of borderline personality disorder (BPD) ( n = 19), and non‐clinical control subjects ( n = 19). Groups were matched for age, verbal IQ and gender. Results: Analysis of variance showed that the ADHD group had significant impairment of SWM performance relative to the non‐clinical controls. Although there was a trend towards impairment in the BPD group relative to non‐clinical controls, this did not reach significance. Conclusion: The results are consistent with the claim that aspects of working memory are ‘particularly impaired’ in adult ADHD. Also, the BPD group had a longer deliberation time for one of the additional tasks, compared with the ADHD group, which indicated that the patient groups may have different patterns of neuropsychological impairments.