Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) make poor decisions due to less differentiated learning processes, according to a recent study.

It is extremely important for our long-term personal development to make decisions that are as optimal as possible. However, People with ADHD often find this difficult. They are known to make impulsive decisions, often choosing options which bring a prompt but smaller reward instead of making a choice that yields a greater reward later on down the line.

Researchers from the University Clinics for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the University of Zurich found that different decision-making processes are responsible for such suboptimal choices and that these take place in the middle of the frontal lobe.

"We were able to demonstrate that young people with ADHD do not inherently have difficulties in learning new information; instead, they evidently use less differentiated learning patterns, which is presumably why sub-optimal decisions are often made," researcher Tobias Hauser said in a statement.

For the study, researchers examined the decision-making processes of 40 young people with and without ADHD. Lying in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner to record the brain activity, the participants played a game where they had to learn which of two images carried more frequent rewards. In order to understand the impaired mechanisms of participants with ADHD better, learning algorithms which originally stemmed from the field of artificial intelligence were used to evaluate the data. These mathematical models help to understand the precise learning and decision-making mechanisms better.

It became apparent that participants with ADHD exhibit an altered functioning in the medial prefrontal cortex - a region in the middle of the frontal lobe. This part of the brain is heavily involved in decision-making processes.

Hauser said he is convinced that the results fundamentally improve our understanding of the mechanisms of impaired decision-making behavior in people with ADHD. 

The findings were recently published in JAMA Psychiatry.