rster et al. (2014) found in a study of adults with ADHD that greater levels of distraction in ADHD can be reduced with an introduction of higher perceptual load in the task. Load Theory suggests high perceptual load can cut down distractor interference easily by filtering distractor stimuli from perception. These finding suggest that distraction in ADHD result from later attention mechanisms, such as the efficiency of executive cortical control, rather than the earlier selective attention mechanism. Competent cortical executive control is essential when early attentional selection fails. The load effects were also found to potentially account for the “hyperfocus” (HF) that has been observed in patients with ADHD (Schecklmann et al., 2008, Hupfeld et al., 2018). Patients with ADHD often experience periods of intensive concentration on certain tasks they find engaging or interesting (e.g. internet searching, playing video games) this is usually associated with perception of zoning out of the surrounding environment.

One way to address the neurodevelopment of covert attention is to study disorders of this process in groups of atypically developing children. ADHD is one of them and another condition that has been linked to deficits in attention and so is ASD. This is why we are going to focus on ASD in here to compare to ADHD to see how the attention differs between the disorders.

Two components of attention that have been commonly studied in both ASD and ADHD are: 1) orienting – prioritising sensory information and 2) sustained attention – linked to frontal areas for example anterior cingulate and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (Petersen & Posner, 2012). Abnormalities in visual orienting have been well defined in ASD, with numerous studies showing that children with ASD show quite specific problems in disengaging and shifting attention under conflict conditions (Keehn et al., 2010). In contrast, children with ADHD generally achieve slowed reaction times when the stimulus is presented