Communication in Adolescents With ADHD

The interpersonal problems of adolescents with ADHD may be the most debilitating aspect of their psychopathologic behaviour. This being said, the investigators still do not have a clear understanding of why it is the case that individuals with ADHD have such impaired social and communicative competence. In particular, research has not identified whether the communicative difficulties stems from deficits in taking the perspective of a communicative partner, or in being able to make use of this information in a systematic way. This study will compare adolescents with ADHD to adolescents not diagnosed with ADHD and their performance on a number of social inference and communication tests. This study hypothesizes that persons with ADHD will not perform as effectively as control participants on the social inference and communication tests, and will evidence lower WM score. As well, this study hypothesizes that a working memory/cognitive load task will impede performance on certain social inference and communication tests to a greater extent in the ADHD population than in the control group.