The Science: Attention Deficit Disorder & Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder
Auditory and visual sequential processing problems of individuals labeled with ADD negatively affect academic ability, decision-making skills, attention span, and behavior in children, as well as social maturity, interaction, learning ability, and productivity of adults. Difficulties in taking in, retaining, and processing information forces the expenditure of valuable time, effort, and energy to compensate for these deficiencies. NACD's sequential processing exercises are used to improve the level of brain function within the ADD-labeled population by improving auditory and visual sequential processing skills, which are the two most fundamental building blocks for all cognitive processes.
Studies completed with ADHD children in 2005 demonstrated that training in auditory sequential processing tasks resulted in increased capacity of the working memory as well as a generalization of that ability to other thinking tasks including visual-spatial tasks (Klingberg, 2005).
Parents of children labeled with ADD claim that whenever they try to get their children to do something their brains cannot do or do not want to do, it frequently results in misbehavior. This immature behavioral response can be attributed to a global immaturity resulting from low sequential processing. The mechanism of guiding behavior by representational knowledge was underdeveloped in human infants and destroyed in monkeys that had prefrontal lesions (Bear et al., 2002). Damage to the prefrontal cortex could spare knowledge about the outside world, yet destroy the organism's ability to bring that stored knowledge to mind and utilize it. Much of brain research comes from injuries of the frontal part of the hemispheres as well as animal experiments (Greenlee, Lang, Mergner, & Seeger, 1995; Sternko & Woods, 1978; Smith et al., 1999). Working memory tasks activate an extended network of the prefrontal, parietal, and medial frontal cortices. Although the parietal and prefrontal cortices make distinct contributions to complex processing (as revealed by lesions), they are interconnected in that their activation patterns are nearly indistinguishable (Halgren, Boujon, Clarke, Wang, Chauvel, 2002).
Loge, et al. (1989) found that individuals with ADD performed well on fluency tests. There was no support for the hypothesis that frontal lobe dysfunction was a prominent feature of cognitive impairment. Moreover, the correlation between verbal IQ and measures of frontal lobe function was weak. The frontal lobe physiological abnormalities that occur in ADD children probably arise in frontal components of widely distributed circuits involved in the "executive" control of attention. Inability to control and sustain attention appeared to be the core of deficiency rather than other factors, such as impulsivity. The right parietal lobe seems to have a role in sustaining attention (Loge, Staton, & Beatty, 1989). Whatever the cause is, sequential processing exercises improve working memory, attention, and reading.
