Dissociable Oscillatory Alpha and Aperiodic Neural Dynamics Underlie Atypical Attentional Control in Children With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

Children with ADHD show atypical demand-related oscillatory alpha modulation—reduced frontal modulation and atypical posterior alpha enhancement—while aperiodic activity does not differ across demand levels.

• Why it matters: ADHD involves difficulty maintaining goal-directed attention when relevant and irrelevant inputs compete, but it is unclear whether this reflects separate problems in demand regulation versus distractor processing.
• What they did: EEG from 45 children with ADHD and 45 typically developing children during a visual detection task with low/high visual demands and standard/deviant sounds; power spectra were split into oscillatory alpha versus aperiodic activity, and machine learning classification used these signatures.
• The result: ADHD-related distractor abnormalities are more clearly linked to the aperiodic slope, and multivariate classification yields robust ADHD-versus-typical discrimination with predictive performance emerging shortly after stimulus onset and persisting through processing.

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