Do All Disorders of Attention Result in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder?

Multiple dysfunctional cognitive processes are found in individuals with ADHD. These include abnormalities of neural responses underlying anticipation or planning of actions, target selection, filtering of distracting information, working memory, response selection and/or inhibition, novelty detection, error signaling, reward evaluation, and feedback-mediated decision-making processes, among others. Any of these processes can be disrupted, and all of these types of disruptions do not produce attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Attention is a complex process that is subserved by a complex neural network system. Hypothetically, this process can be disrupted at any point in this system. It is hard to imagine that the resulting disruption would be the same in every case, and that means that there are more types of attentional deficiencies than just the three types of attentional issues detailed in the current clinical literature. There are also indications that symptoms vary in severity, and individuals with milder symptoms may have attentional problems but are not classified with ADHD. There is a continuum of attentional functioning and the idea of a heavily integrated and non-dissociable neural network supporting attentional processes. Taken together, this implies that attentional disorders likely share many characteristics with other disorders.