Interference control in adolescents with Mild-to-Borderline Intellectual Disabilities and/or behavior disorders

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate interference control in adolescents with Mild to Borderline Intellectual Disability (MBID) by addressing two key questions. First, as MBID is often associated with comorbid behavior disorders (BD), we investigated whether MBID and BD both affect interference control. Second, we studied whether interference control deficits are associated to problems in everyday executive functioning. Four groups of adolescents with and without MBID and/or BD performed the Eriksen flanker task, requiring participants to respond to a central target while ignoring interfering flanking stimuli. Their teachers rated behavior on the Behavior Rating Inventory Executive Function (BRIEF). We found pronounced effects of MBID but not BD on flanker interference control. In contrast, we observed pronounced effects of BD, but not MBID, on the BRIEF. In addition, flanker interference scores and BRIEF scores did not correlate. These results are taken to suggest that adolescents with MBID are characterized by deficits in interference control that do not become manifest in ratings of everyday executive functioning. In contrast, adolescents with BD are not characterized by deficits in interference control but do show elevated ratings of deficits in everyday executive function.

Keywords:

• Intellectual disabilities
• Behavior disorder
• Interference control
• Flanker task
• Executive function

The authors thank Tijs Arbouw and Sabine Feith for their valuable assistance in gathering the data and Mariette Huizinga for providing the flanker task. The authors further thank Emaus College, Emmaschool, Jan van Egmond Lyceum and SG Nelson Mandela, and all students for participating in this study. This study was supported by a grant from the Research Institute of Psychology, Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam.

Notes

¹ This procedure did not alter the interpretation of the results.

² Running the analyses on untransformed scores resulted in somewhat lower p values, but did not change the pattern of effects.

³ Accuracy scores were severely skewed. Therefore, we also analyzed accuracy scores with nonparametric tests. The Kruskal Wallis test indicated that groups did not differ in accuracy on congruent and incongruent trials (p = .92). Neither did groups differ in accuracy on incongruent trials relative to congruent trials (p = .82).