Welcome to Hacking your ADHD.

I'm your host, William Curb, and I have ADHD on this podcast, adding into the tools, tactics, and best practices to help you work with your ADHD Brain.

Today I'm joined by Sky Waterton for our research recap series.

In this series, we take a look at a single research paper, dive into what the paper says, how it was conducted, and try to find any key practical takeaways, you know, stuff that you can actually use.

In this episode, we're going to be discussing a paper called DO Executive Dysfunction, delay Aversion and Time Perception Deficits, predict ADHD Symptoms and Early Academic Performance in Preschoolers.

And yeah, there's a lot in there, but don't worry, we'll be getting into all of it.

Now, before we get started, I want to mention that this is still a new series, so we're going to be figuring out what works and what doesn't, and I'd love to hear what you all think of it.

So if you have thoughts, head on over to hacking your adhd.com/contact and let me know.

I appreciate all the feedback I've already gotten and we're definitely going to be working on trying to do a few things with a show and shaking things up.

try and get the episodes a little bit more organized, and help you get the most out of every one.

New episodes of Research Recap will be coming out every other Friday.

And with that, let's get into it.

so the paper we're looking at, today is, about time perception and long-term academic performance.

But really importantly, and we'll talk about this more, it's about that in preschoolers.

So we wanna keep in mind these are four to five year olds.

So what.

We are looking at here, if you wanna just give a little baseline introduction before, um, will, goes into the, the methodology and how they did this is that they found that children with ADHD are commonly observed to have learning dis difficulties.

They talk about things like dyscalculia, which I have, so I definitely related to that.

And they wanted to look at how.

Three neuropsychological constructs.

So that's executive dysfunction, delay aversion, and time perception.

And we'll talk a little bit about what those are.

We're associated with ADHD symptoms and academic performance in preschoolers at risk of ADHD.

Oh, in terms of how this was done, this was done in Hong Kong and they measured it at different time periods, and what they found was interesting in terms of the relationship between our working memory, our time blindness, and potentially our academic performance.

So yeah.

Will do you want to go into how they did this?

Yeah.

and it is very interesting, I think, as we were, just to emphasize what you're saying again.

Yeah.

These are four to five year olds and we're talking about, having lived through, having children that were four to five and knowing their friends.

Doing that, ADHD assessment is very difficult at that age.

and so that's like the first thing we should really discuss here is this idea of how they are measuring ADHD, which for this case was just a teacher parent questionnaire that, goes often would be the first step in a diagnosis for a lot of people.

but then that's just the standard.

That's where they stop with looking for the diagnosis, It's symptoms.

They found symptoms, not diagnostic.

ADHD at this point.

Yeah.

'cause it's like, what's the difference between a 4-year-old with ADHD who can't sit still and a 4-year-old without ADHD who can't sit still, there's, that's can be a little bit harder to define because you don't have a lot of the like inhibition, control and all that things developed yet.

So typically we don't see that many children at that age being formally diagnosed, but.

It is something where you do want to start, like with my own children, that's when we were starting to look because we did see noticeable differences in how they were performing.

not academically, but like socially and all that kind of stuff.

And of course, it's every kid's gonna be different and that's why it's important to go beyond just that, initial to Questionnaire being like, Hey, do you have these symptoms?

They were also then looking, they were doing a, academic performance was based on these like standardized early literacy and number tests.

Um, obviously, Chinese literacy because this was in Hong Kong, So they were using working memory for the, this executive function side of things.

For the delay version, they were using computer game that would, they could.

choose to, it was like a choose to destroy enemy spaceship at one point in time for a score or wait and have the delay and get two points Should we describe, what delay version actually is?

basically it's like marshmallow test idea that we most people know about where it, like this delayed gratification where you're trying to, Get the immediate reward versus delayed reward.

which is often something that is a huge issue for people with ADHD where they're just like, yeah, I need, I need that thing right now as I need the dopamine.

If I don't have it, exactly.

Which is what they were testing.

They also had delay frustration, which was a different task, which I love the title of Yeah, delay, frustration.

So much fun.

Basically, um, they introduced a game that children will ask to answer 45 questions compared to the size of two animals.

Choose a small one by pressing a button to indicate their choices.

For most of the trials.

The next question would appear as soon as the participant responded with a button press.

However, in some cases, the presentation of the next question was delayed By some seconds, people weren't informed of the delay, but they were just told the computer was slow, so they were basically given a test of an old computer that doesn't work properly, which, yeah, that would create delay, frustration in any age group, I think.

Yeah.

I like just listening to the description of that task.

I'm just like, I would, I A lot of these tasks feel like that.

I mean, they are, they are testing things that we don't like and then we get to the time piece.

'cause they also did a time reproduction task and a time discrimination task.

And this was really interesting because what they argued was that.

The time, the introduction of a, a measure of time was new.

This was the newest thing that they were doing.

they, you know, people had done working memory, people had done delay aversion, but they hadn't really separated and looked at time in the same way.

And that's what they were doing here.

yeah, 'cause it was a lot about just how they were, able to like, figure out how long something took, be like, the 'cause.

The description is the task was presented in game light format where the child was asked to look at a light bulb appearing on the screen and try to determine how I would fail so hard at that.

up.

Immediately afterwards, the child was asked to reproduce the same duration by turning off and on another light via pushing a button on the keyboard.

I would love to see control versus ADHD on this one because I feel like this is Yeah, well they have done tests of this before, and they have found there is a difference between control versus ADHD, um, in other papers.

But, I think the difference can sometimes be very small.

Um, so you're really talking about small amounts.

And in the time discrimination task, they had a similar thing.

You've got, um, they had people here, three tones.

Two of them are.

You know, 1,200 milliseconds long.

and then some of them are different and people had to identify, you know, the odd, they said the odd ball, the odd time in each trial.

Some of them were easy, some of them were harder.

But again, it's this perception of time, how long.

Are things going to take, to you and how well do you do this?

So there is research to indicate that this is the case, but what they were looking at specifically that made their paper different was they were connecting it to academic performance, which, was very interesting.

Yeah, and I would love to see that outside of four year olds That would be really good.

Yeah.

it's, I feel like there could be some connection with how long you think something's taking.

Like I know.

Taking tests can be very stressful with ADHD because you have this, this time blindness aspect where you're like, I don't know how long it took me to do this problem.

I need to rush through the rest of this test to try and get through everything.

Because I'm like, if I don't have can't see a clock, then I don't know how long things are taking and it feels like I just need to go as fast as I can, and that is going to produce sub-optimal Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

Um, and if you want to see before we go into the results, if you guys want to see an annotated copy of this entire paper, you can just DM me Time at Unconventional Organization on Instagram.

Also just ask questions there as well, if you have any follow up questions.

And we can kind of take you through this a little bit more, but essentially where we're at right now is, yeah, so preschoolers in Hong Kong, they were not tested, you know, not diagnosed with ADHD, but seen to have ADHD symptoms and they're tested on their, working memory, their marshmallow test essentially, and their time perception.

And then they were also tested on their academic performance in both numbers and in Chinese word reading in a later date to see what the effect was.

So what were the results?

What did they find?

I.

mean they found that, these things all, had a predictor on this academic success.

But it was the, having that executive function piece, that working memory piece was the strongest indicator of having a link to academic performance while the, there was delay aversion and time perception that had a link, but it was not, nearly as, significant as the yeah.

Yeah.

So they found really interesting, you know, they, started controlling for families, socioeconomic status, general ability, et cetera, which makes a lot of sense.

And then they found that when those were controlled for.

Uh, time perception of working memory contributed to children's academic performance at time one and time two.

Um, specifically Chinese word reading, which they argued was actually harder in terms of a working memory than English word reading.

They'd done tests on that before, which I thought was really interesting because again, these tests can be different in different countries, but they were arguing that if you struggle to remember things.

If you struggle with time, you are going to have hard, a harder time based on this paper with academic performance long term, which is interesting.

I think it's, um, it's sort of obvious, but also interesting to see it here because we don't always think of time perception specifically as a factor in your ability to do things academically.

Working memory.

Yes.

Time less so.

I actually, sitting and thinking about it like, oh yeah, you could be like, I'm bored from reading 'cause I have been doing this forever.

I, yeah.

Or that, I don't have time to do this.

I don't have time to study for these things because I have to go do this other thing.

And it's less a direct thing, but more of our, perception of things.

And I feel like that means that using certain strategies could really mitigate Yeah, a hundred percent.

And it was interesting, they also said that it related to other papers and other things that were also done with preschoolers.

Um, and a few studies with older children that showed that people who had developmental dyscalculia.

Which is sort of like math, dyslexia.

I actually have that perform more poorly than healthy controls in time processing as well.

So there seems to be this connection between time blindness essentially, which is what we're talking about here, and your ability to do things like basic math or English or you know, Chinese letter writing.

And it does.

I think the biggest thing I had wanted to know, and I don't feel like it was fully described, described in this.

So if you do have any ideas, please let us know.

Like message us and let us know why do you think this is, you know, do you feel like this is a factor for you and, and why?

Yeah, because I'd love, again, while great as a initial study here, I feel like aging this up to other groups, would be more informative for the long run of things.

and again, because then we can do some of those, mitigating strategies that might, correct for this.

And you go, okay, we found this result where this time, effect is something that, is significant enough to measure.

And then we've tried to do these mitigating factors like using a timer or having, practice estimating tasks to see how long they take.

And then does that have a good effect on actually making it so that you have, you improve your academic performance simply from the fact that you have done these strategies that are exactly.

Exactly.

And I feel like that ability to do these, yeah, I think this is a great paper to get a sense of the struggles.

And then the next paper is experimentation to find out.

How to fix them.

I will say though, those papers are sadly much rarer because it's not usually the point.

The point is to find the struggles and then, solve it with, one or two things and not necessarily look for specifics.

for me personally, this is usually the paper that makes me go out and look for a solution.

Like you said, externalizing time.

Do we, if you use timers, how does that work?

what are the other ways you can support time blindness?

I think externalizing time is a massive one, like having lots of clocks and lots of, not necessarily timers, but having that visual timer, that red timer where you see time passing, things like that can be really helpful.

a lot of times people feel like, they should have like alarms on all the time, but that can be very frustrating.

And actually when you look at this paper.

It doesn't actually help as much as you think it is because you can look at it at a clock or a timer and it can say you've got 25 minutes, and you can look at it again, and it can say You have two minutes.

You're not very good at measuring it.

So time timers and things like that do a much better job.

Yeah.

I also love when I'm.

Trying to do a task I really don't want to do, but I'm like, okay, this is gonna take this amount of time.

I like look up and like it's been 10 seconds.

I've just spent three Yes, exactly.

Exactly.

And I think maybe a little bit of, a little bit of, what's the word?

Like acceptance or acknowledgement that maybe the struggles that you had with time.

Could have affected academic outcomes.

I know I always felt like in exams, I was rushing.

I was like, oh my God, I have no time.

I have to go.

And then I would rush through the whole thing and sometimes I would miss the last paper.

I regularly got to a point where I had to double check that I hadn't missed, you know, the last page of an exam paper.

Because I definitely did that because I was always rushing.

'cause I felt like I didn't have enough time.

I wasn't able to measure it accurately and the clocks weren't always very good.

So things like that, you know, if that's you, if you've been in that experience, this might be an ADHD thing, um, that you have experienced and, and there might be reasons for that.

Yeah.

I think that's a great takeaway for us here that yeah, if you ha are experiencing some of these things that are.

Maybe outside of the academic area, it might still be affecting that kind of, thing, be it and, beyond academics, into work performance where you're like, oh, I only have so much time before I have to do this thing.

So I have to just rush in whatever I'm doing and not do as good of a job as I know I could.

And if you need help with any strategies, you can always, you know, DM me.

I'm always happy to share.

I know we'll probably be the same, but, 'cause there are strategies out there.

As much as it can be frustrating to see this stuff even among preschoolers and be like, oh, what It's gonna affect academic performance, you know, and, and be negative.

There are strategies out there, it just doesn't often get covered in the academic literature.

And that's the piece that, that's why we talk to you guys and we share this research.

So we can also bring some of that, some of that, um, strategy as well.

Hello.

So you were just listening to a research recap.

Um, I'm Sky Waterson of Unconventional organization.

If you like that there's lots more information about ADHD and support for you@unconventionalorganization.com, you can go ahead and check that out.

Uh, lots of free resources, lots of strategies, and if you wanna join our programs you can do that as well.

and we'll see you there.

Unconventional organization.