Hyperactivity and incidental memory: evidence for attentional diffusion.

2 experiments examined hyperactive children's attentional diffusion, that is, their tendency to underfocus their attention during learning. In Experiment 1 hyperactive children correctly rejected more incorrect incidental information than their nonhyperactive peers, indicating they were more likely to process noncentral attributes. This type of diffuse attention did not interfere with hyperactive children's overall memory performance. Experiment 2 varied the difficulty level of encoding central information, either by limiting the time available for encoding it (brief vs. long) or by varying the meaningfulness of the central information (high associative value shapes vs. low associative value ones). Results showed that hyperactives outperformed nonhyperactives on incidental recognition only when the encoding demands of the central task were easy. Easy encoding permitted them to attend to incidental information without sacrificing central information. Taken together, the results of both experiments demonstrated the validity of the attentional diffusion hypothesis and indicate the need to assess the central processing demands associated with central and incidental learning in order to evaluate the extent of hyperactive children's attentional diffusion.