This study investigated the potential accident-proneness of adolescents with AttentionDeficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in a hazardous road-crossing environment. An immersive virtual reality traffic gap-choice task was used to determine whether ADHD adolescents show more unsafe road crossing behavior than controls. Participants (aged 13-17) were identified with (n = 24) or without (n = 24) ADHD according to a standardized protocol (K-SADS-PL and Conners Scales), with equal number of males (n = 12) and females (n = 12) in each group. ADHD adolescents did not take stimulant medication on the day of testing. ADHD participants had a lower margin of safety, walked slower, underutilized the available gap in incoming traffic, showed greater variability in road-crossing behavior and evidenced twice as many collisions as compared to controls. No sex differences were found. Virtual reality may help identify and educate those at higher risk of being involved in dangerous traffic situations.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.