FROM PHENOMENA TO THEORY-GUIDED MECHANISMS: CHANGING PERSPECTIVES ON ADHD

funded by Else Kröner Fresenius Stiftung

Principal Investigators: Prof. Dr. Christian Beste, Prof. Dr. Bernhard Hommel, Prof. Dr. Veit Roessner

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most frequent neurodevelopmental disorders. Although past research has made progress in describing ADHD and identifying its biological and psychological correlates, there is no coherent mechanistic framework integrating the various phenotypic disturbances. To overcome this, we propose a novel ADHD theory and perspective change on ADHD that is based on neurocognitive principles derived from two well-established mechanistic theories on event segmentation and on metacontrol that allow us to better understand the majority of ADHD symptoms. Our working program uses behavioral and neuroscience methods to test the suitability of this theory in an ecologically valid proof-of-principle approach, and to directly link the hypothesized mechanisms to specific diagnostic criteria. If successful, our project will provide evidence for the first mechanistic neurocognitive ADHD theory that integrates and helps understanding the heterogeneous, fluctuating symptoms of this disorder in the context of its common co-existing conditions, and provides evidence-based weightings of diagnostic criteria according to their mechanistic relevance and contribution. This will provide entirely new, innovative options for both diagnosis and (psycho)therapeutic interventions. The generic, mechanism-based nature of our approach can be easily applied to other psychiatric conditions, which will strongly contribute to and stimulate a truly integrative psychiatry that overcomes the present dispersion into subfields and cognitive subdomains as also still present in the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) approach/project.