A stages-of-information approach to hyperactivity.

In a memory search task with context recognition, three groups of children were examined: hyperactives, somewhat hyperactives and controls. It was found that the hyperactive groups differed from controls at the intercept of reaction time and not the slope. This was interpreted as evidence against a selective attention hypothesis in hyperactivity and evidence of either an 'encoding' or a response organization deficit. The unexpected slower and less accurate performance of somewhat hyperactives than those rated as hyperactives may have been due to the higher rating of variable task application in the former than in the latter.