Infant Habituation Task Performance is Associated With Familial Risk for Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

Objective Habituation paradigms have been widely employed with neurotypical infants distinguishing short (vs. long) looking as a signal of early individual differences in attention and learning efficiency. An objective task has yet to be identified linking potential early markers of risk for childhood attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in infancy before formal identification of ADHD. Method Infants 8-10 months old from two cohort studies examining early signals of risk for ADHD completed two habituation tasks (multimodal and unimodal stimuli). Latent growth mixture models were used to identify subclasses of looking times across 20 trials. Results Participants were 147 infants ( μ =9mo, 52% male) at high (at least one parent with ADHD; n=68) or low (neither parent with ADHD; n=79) familial risk for ADHD. Three subclasses based on initial looking time and speed of habituation were identified for both tasks. Infants at familial risk for ADHD had significantly longer initial looking times to the multimodal task (Z=-2.53, P= .01) and were 4.5 times more likely to fall into a long looker-slow to habituate subtype as opposed to the short looker subtype on the multimodal task (OR 4.5, P =.02). Conclusion This study is the first to identify an objective task of infant attention and learning with performance associated with familial likelihood for childhood ADHD. Early identification of children who may develop ADHD is crucial to move towards development and implementation of preventative interventions to potentially reduce symptoms and impairment for children with ADHD.