A Behavioural Investigation of Multisensory Integration in Youth with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

Multisensory integration is a key sensory process which has a role in cognitive development. Multisensory integration has been demonstrated to be affected in ADHD largely in adults, but findings have been inconsistent. In this study, we examined whether multisensory integration differed in youth (ages 6-17) with ADHD (n=53) and without ADHD (n=60) using three different behavioural tasks (i.e., SIFI, McGurk, and speech-in-noise). No group differences were found in the SIFI, but ADHD youth showed reduced susceptibility to the McGurk illusion compared to neurotypical (NT) youth. The speech-in-noise task revealed no differences in multisensory gain, though hyperactive-impulsive traits were trending negatively related to phoneme accuracy. Overall, the results suggest reduced multisensory integration in youth with ADHD, using tasks involving speech stimuli. These results suggest that stimulus complexity may be important to examine for multisensory integration in ADHD, and further, multisensory integration may be affected across development in ADHD.