Children with ADHD report applying less effort on cognitive tasks compared to their peers

A recent study published in the Journal of Attention Disorders suggests that children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder perceive their own effort on cognitive tasks differently than their neurotypical peers. Specifically, children with the condition report trying less hard across a variety of brain-teasing activities, even though they do not rate the activities as any more difficult. This provides evidence that self-reported effort could offer useful insights into the daily challenges faced by children with the disorder.

Metacognition refers to a person’s ability to monitor and regulate their own thinking processes. If you have ever realized that you need to re-read a paragraph because your mind wandered, you were using metacognition to evaluate your focus and change your approach.

Previous research shows that children with attention disorders often score lower on cognitive tests. These tests typically measure executive functions, which are the mental skills needed to pay attention, follow rules, and control impulses. However, the researchers wanted to know how these children subjectively experience these mental workouts in real time.

“There is a large literature showing that children with ADHD often perform differently than neurotypical children on cognitive tasks, especially tasks involving attention, intellectual abilities, and executive functioning. However, much less work has examined metacognitive monitoring, or subjective judgments about how a task is going, in relation to actual performance on these tasks,” said study author Adrian Torres Tacchino, a graduate student at York University.

“The methods used in this study offer a different approach for understanding how children with ADHD evaluate their performance, drawing on the metacognition and meta-reasoning literatures. There is already a literature showing that children with ADHD often overestimate their performance relative to neurotypical children, a pattern commonly referred to as Positive Illusory Bias (PIB). The current study extends this work by examining how children with ADHD perceive task difficulty and how hard they feel they tried on cognitive tasks.”

To explore this, the researchers recruited 80 children between the ages of 8 and 12 years old. This group included 38 children with a formal diagnosis of an attention disorder and 42 neurotypical children without the condition. Both groups had similar average intelligence scores and an equal spread of ages.

To test their mental processes, the children completed four distinct cognitive activities. The first activity was a brief intelligence test measuring verbal and nonverbal reasoning. The second was a mental flexibility activity, which required children to connect circles alternating between numbers and letters in a specific sequence.

The third activity was an interference control test. This required the children to name the color of the ink a word was printed in, rather than reading the written word itself, which tests the ability to filter out distracting information. Finally, the children completed an unstructured activity consisting of simple math, reading, and copying questions.

The items on the unstructured activity were scattered randomly on a large sheet of paper, and the examiner gave very little direction on how to proceed. This specific setup was designed to see how children perform when they have to organize their own progress without clear rules. Immediately after finishing each of the four activities, the children answered two questions about their experience.

They rated how difficult the activity felt on a five-point scale, using pictures of a person carrying either a light or heavy box to help them decide. They also rated how hard they tried on a separate five-point scale.

The researchers found that children with ADHD reported putting less effort into the activities compared to the neurotypical children. This lower effort rating was consistent across all four types of activities. Even on the unstructured activity or the standard intelligence test, the children with the condition felt they were not trying as hard as their peers. At the same time, the two groups of children did not show any differences in how difficult they found the activities overall.

Children with ADHD rated the challenge of the activities equally to the neurotypical group. Both groups agreed that the interference control activity, which required ignoring written words to state ink colors, was the most difficult and required the most effort. The lack of differences in task difficulty ratings between the two groups might partly be explained by a phenomenon known as the positive illusory bias.

This is a tendency for individuals with ADHD to under-recognize their own difficulties and rate their performance more favorably than objective tests would suggest. In this context, children with the condition might downplay how challenging a task feels, even if their actual performance suggests they are struggling. The scientists also noticed a pattern in how the children rated their experiences across the different tests.

A child’s rating of how hard they tried tended to remain similar across all four activities. This suggests that the amount of effort a child applies might be a steady personal trait, reflecting their general motivation or willingness to engage. In contrast, a child’s rating of an activity’s difficulty varied from test to test. This provides evidence that perceived difficulty is linked to the specific demands of each unique activity rather than a general mindset.

The researchers noted that these findings support the idea that perceiving a task’s difficulty and choosing to apply effort are two completely separate mental processes.

“One thing that stood out was that different types of subjective ratings may capture importantly different aspects of metacognitive monitoring,” Torres told PsyPost. “For example, ratings of effort and task difficulty were largely unrelated to each other. A child could say a task was not especially difficult but still report trying very hard on it, and vice versa. This suggests that there may be important differences not only between subjective ratings and objective performance, but also among different kinds of subjective ratings themselves.”

The researchers also found that a child’s actual performance generally had very little connection to how hard they felt they tried. Getting a high score did not necessarily mean the child felt they tried very hard. This disconnect suggests that self-reported ratings capture a unique aspect of a child’s experience that traditional test scores miss entirely.

“The key takeaway is that subjective ratings of effort on cognitive tasks by children with ADHD may tell us something important that is not captured by performance scores or informant reports alone,” Torres said.

While these findings offer helpful insights, there are some limitations to consider when interpreting the data. The study relied on a single subjective rating at the very end of each activity. Asking children to rate their effort multiple times during a test might capture a more accurate picture of their fluctuating attention.

Another limitation is the demographic makeup of the participants. The sample of children with the condition was predominantly male, which makes it difficult to know if the findings apply equally to girls. Research suggests that girls with the condition often experience more internalized symptoms, like low self-esteem, which could alter how they judge their own effort and performance. Future studies could benefit from exploring whether children underreport their effort as a self-protective mechanism.

“We would not want readers to interpret these findings as meaning that children with ADHD simply lack motivation or are not trying,” Torres noted. “Rather, we hope these findings are interpreted as showing that children with ADHD can provide useful subjective information about how they experience cognitive tasks. This is important because their own perspectives may offer insight that is not captured by performance scores alone. One possible interpretation is that sustaining mental effort may feel especially difficult or aversive for some children with ADHD. That idea is consistent with the DSM-5-TR description of ADHD, which includes ‘often avoids, dislikes, or is reluctant to engage in tasks that require sustained mental effort.’”

“We hope this study encourages further empirical work on subjective ratings as a way of assessing metacognitive monitoring in relation to performance on cognitive tasks among children with ADHD. This approach may offer useful information for researchers and clinicians seeking to better understand how children with ADHD approach cognitive and academic tasks, including in structured testing settings and in the classroom.”

The study, “Metacognitive Ratings on Cognitive Tasks: Task Difficulty and Effort Rating Differences in Children With ADHD and Neurotypical Children,” was authored by Adrian P. Torres and Maggie E. Toplak.