Hood-Nellum, Tierel “Testing the Interplay Between ADHD Symptomology and Early Substance Experimentation on Spatial Abilities in Adolescents”
Mentor: Krista Lisdahl
Poster #213

Deficits in an adolescent’s spatial reasoning abilities could impact many basic domains of their functioning, including reading and math computation. Understanding factors that impact spatial ability development is therefore imperative. This proposed study examines the interaction between Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) symptomology and early low-level substance-use in predicting spatial abilities in youth. The study sample (n=7,164) was collected from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. ADHD symptomology was measured using both parent reports (the Child Behavior Checklist; CBCL) and youth self-reports (the Kiddie Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia; KSADS). Low-level substance-use was measured using an adapted version of the iSay sip inventory. Spatial abilities were measured using the Little Man task and the Flanker task, which measure mental rotation and visuospatial inhibitory control, respectively. Across all analyses, ADHD symptomology was negatively while low-level substance use was positively linked with spatial performance, though the interactions between theses variables were insignificant; the models accounted for a small amount of variance (adjusted R²=0.010 in both CBCL models; R²=0.007 and R² =0.005 for KSADS models on the Little Man and Flanker tasks, respectively), with small effect sizes (all η2 values less than .01)]. Results demonstrated that youth with low substance use performed marginally better in terms of spatial abilities than substance-naive youth and that youth with more ADHD symptoms performed worse than their typically-developing counterparts. It is important to state that these results do not show that substance use is meaningfully correlated with better spatial abilities; the effect sizes are too small to make such a claim. This study also limited risky behavior to only low-level substance use and relied heavily on self-report measures. In the future, studies could examine whether additional risk behaviors, or heavier substance use, are correlated with spatial abilities.