Beyond Exploration: Heightened Recent Reward Reliance and Midfrontal Sensitivity to Outcome Differences in ADHD

Adults with ADHD show heightened reliance on the immediately preceding reward, alongside greater midfrontal slow-wave sensitivity to consecutive payoff shifts (280–568 ms, <2 Hz), without performance loss.

• Why it matters: It remains unclear how ADHD affects the balance between exploiting known rewards and updating choices from recent outcomes in volatile environments.
• What they did: In a restless four-armed bandit task with dynamically changing payoffs, 23 adults with self-reported clinical ADHD and 27 controls completed 450 trials while EEG measured feedback-evoked activity.
• The result: ADHD participants were more likely to repeat after high-reward feedback and switch after low rewards, and they showed larger midfrontal responses to unsigned changes between consecutive payoffs, dissociating exploration rate from outcome weighting.

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