Funções executivas na infância : impacto de idade, sexo, tipo de escola, escolaridade parental e sintomas de desatenção/hiperatividade

• Autor(a) principal: Jacobsen, Geise Machado
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da PUC_RS
• Texto Completo: http://tede2.pucrs.br/tede2/handle/tede/6561
• topic: DESENVOLVIMENTO INFANTIL; HIPERATIVIDADE; PSICOLOGIA; CIENCIAS HUMANAS::PSICOLOGIA

This dissertation, by means of two empirical studies, aimed to analyze the impact of biological/individual, clinical and sociocultural factors on the executive performance of children with normal development or diagnosed with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The first study aimed to evaluate whether age, gender, type of school and parental education could predict executive performance in school-age children. Unconstrained (UVF), phonemic (PVF) and semantic verbal fluency (SVF) tasks (n=402), as well as the Hayling Sentence Completion Test - Child version (HSCT-C) (n=275) and the Random Number Generation (RNG) task (n=274) were administered to typically developing 6-to-12-year-old children. A hierarchical regression analysis was performed (p≤0.05). The most significant explanatory models involved child age and parental education (UVF, PVF and RNG), as well as these two variables in addition to the type of school attended by the child (SVF and HSCT-C). The main individual predictors of executive performance were age (VF tasks and RNG) and school type (HSCT-C). These results may be related to structural and functional alterations in the brain, an increased repertoire of cognitive strategies, the effects of education and the intensity of environmental cognitive stimulation. The second study aimed to identify subgroups of executive processing in children with ADHD and to determine whether biological (age and sex), clinical (presentation of the disorder, frequency of ADHD symptoms and difficulties in reading and writing), and sociocultural (parental education and type of school attended by children) factors would contribute to differentiate the clusters. UVF, HSCT-C, Narrative Discourse and Digits were administered to 61 6- to 12-year-old children diagnosed with ADHD. Hierarchical cluster analysis and MANCOVA were performed (p≤0.05). Participants were distributed in three clusters: 1) high frequency/severity (F/S) of deficits in cognitive flexibility (CF) and in inhibition (IN); 2) low F/S of deficits in CF and in working memory (WM), but with deficits in IN; and 3) high F/S of deficits in CF and in WM and low F/S of deficits in IN. Thus, there is no unique neuropsychological profile in ADHD: there may be different patterns of executive processing, with different cognitive strengths and weaknesses. There were no differences among the clusters in relation to biological, clinical, and sociocultural factors. It is hypothesized that the expression of the disorder overcame protective factors for executive development. The findings of this dissertation may contribute to the assessment and intervention in executive skills of children with normal development or ADHD, as well as to prepare stimulation programs for executive functions in clinical and educational settings.