Performance Calibration in Children With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) And A Community Sample of Typically Developing Children

This study investigated performance calibration in 81 8-12 year-old children [M = 119.89 months (or 9 years, 11months), SD = 14.92 months, 26 females], 39 with and 42 without ADHD, from the Greater Toronto Area. Performance calibration was evaluated across the domains of general knowledge, emotion recognition, and recognition of the valence of social situations using several indices. Parents of children in the clinical ADHD group rated their childrens performance calibration skills significantly lower than parents in the typically developing (TD) group. While no group difference in performance calibration for general knowledge items were observed, the easy-hard effect was demonstrated, such that harder items elicited overconfidence and easier items elicited underconfidence across groups. The clinical ADHD group rated their effort expenditure significantly lower across most tasks although there were no differences in the perception of difficulty compared to the TD group. The clinical ADHD group was significantly overconfident on emotion recognition compared to the TD group, whereas the TD group was more accurate and underconfident across emotions. The clinical ADHD group was more confident overall when recognizing the valence of ambiguous social situations and more confident on the negative situations compared to the TD group. Thus, this study obtained performance calibration differences across facial emotion recognition and interpretation of social situations for children with ADHD compared to a TD group. The Bias Index, a measure of under/overconfidence, was recommended for future examinations of group differences in performance calibration. An investigation of the clinical utility of different performance calibration measures is presented and implications for interventions are discussed.