Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

This study will look at the development of Executive Functioning (EF) in Children with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). EF can be thought of as goal directed, higher-order thinking that overrides more automatic responses. Such functions or factors include planning, inhibition and flexible thought (Garon, Bryson & Smith, 2008). It is hypothesized that the impairment of EF in ADHD is that EF does not differentiate to the level seen in the average typically developing child and therefore the ADHD child does not have the specialized resources to needed for planning, inhibition and overriding of automatic responses. In order to test this hypothesis this study will look at two EF's - response inhibition and verbal and spatial working memory - in both children with ADHD and those without, across two age groups - 6 and 9 year olds.