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Ortiz, Nick

Neuroscience Graduate Program

2013

M.S.

An important characteristic of childhood attention-deficitlhyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a bias towards small immediate versus larger delayed rewards, but it is not known if this symptom is also a feature of adult ADHD. A hypothetical delay-discounting task was administered to participants with adult ADHD and a comparison group in conjunction with functional magnetic resonance imaging. Participants responded to a series of hypothetical questions that required judgments between small sums of money available immediately and larger sums obtained after a temporal delay. Question parameters were adjusted by an adaptive algorithm designed to converge on each participant's discounting indifference point, an individual set point at which there is equal valuation of both choices.
In all participants, robust task activation was observed in regions previously identified in functional imaging studies of delay discounting. However, adults with ADHD showed less task activation in a number of regions including the dorolateral prefrontal cortex, superior frontal gyrus, anterior cingulate, caudate nucleus and declive of the cerebellum. Additionally, the degree to which a participant discounted delayed rewards was inversely related to task activation in the cerebellum. These findings suggest ADHD-related bias towards immediate rewards persists into adulthood and may be associated with alerations in frontostriatal and frontocerebellar networks.