ADHD medication amplifies brain response to grammatically ambiguous sentences, study finds
In a neuroimaging study published in PNAS, a team of researchers led by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen recorded the brain activity of healthy adults during sentence comprehension after raising catecholamine levels with stimulant medication (methylphenidate). Higher catecholamine levels led to stronger recruitment of cognitive resources during processing of…
A study published in PNAS reveals that ADHD medication enhances brain activity when processing grammatically ambiguous sentences. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen used neuroimaging to investigate the impact of methylphenidate, a common ADHD treatment, on sentence comprehension. Participants, 30 healthy adults, were asked to read ambiguous and unambiguous sentences while their brain activity was recorded via EEG.
Methylphenidate increased the P600 response—a measure of cognitive effort—to the garden-path sentences, particularly in individuals with lower baseline working memory capacity. This suggests that catecholamine systems, which regulate attention, working memory, and cognitive control, play a role in syntactic processing. The findings indicate that these neurochemical systems may influence language comprehension beyond semantic aspects, potentially changing the way the brain combines words into grammatical structures.
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