The clinical ADHD test so resembles a video game it is hard to distinguish

Evidence

As it happens, the actual clinical test for disordered attention is, unsurprisingly perhaps, so close to a video game that a number of researchers recently experimented with letting kids play an actual video game instead! On the one hand, one might sort of say “Hmm, that makes sense, if a kid cannot keep watching a screen for a long time and hit the space bar when a certain word or letter appears, that kid may have some kind of attention problem.” On the other hand, one might step back from this experimental setup and ask, “How the HECK did this become the way we think about human attention?” — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 154

Categorization

• FICTION: Could seed a dystopian scene where an intact neural capacity — say, attention to something real and alive — is pathologized because only screen-response performance counts.
• SHARE: Anyone who works with kids or neuroscience would love the detail that researchers literally substituted a videogame for the diagnostic.