Date of Award

5-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts (BA)

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Barton, Michelle

Area of Concentration

Psychology

Abstract

Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is associated with impairments in executive functioning (EF), working memory, and time related processing. These deficits create challenges in prospective memory (PM) which is the ability to remember a future task. PM is essential for everyday functioning, and prior research has shown that adults with ADHD already experience PM difficulties, and expands on the difficulties ADHD individuals have with planning. It has been suggested that temporal myopia (TM), a cognitive bias prioritizing immediate goals rather than future goals, is expanding on explaining why individuals with ADHD are vulnerable to PM difficulties. The higher the TM (also known as time blindless) an individual has, the more they may struggle to maintain future oriented intentions. This increases the chances of not meeting deadlines, forgetting tasks or delayed actions. The current study examined whether college students with ADHD perform worse on PM tasks compared to neurotypical college students and whether TM predicts PM performance, especially within the ADHD group. A sample of 34 college students ranging from 18-24 from New College of Florida completed a consent and demographic questionnaire assessing ADHD status, medication use, and academic year. Participants then completed a computerized prospective memory task using an adapted Sternberg Memory Scanning Task, followed by the Consideration of Future Consequences Scale, a 12 question Likert scale questionnaire measuring preference for immediate versus delayed rewards (TM). All participants received compensation, and completed testing in a quiet research space. The first hypothesis predicted that participants with ADHD would perform worse on the PM task compared to the control group. This was not supported as the results showed that the two groups did not differ in how quickly they responded to the timer when they did respond. As predicted, the ADHD group showed more TM than the non ADHD group. Correlational analyses within the ADHD group showed a negative correlation such that those with ADHD showed that lower levels of TM were predictive of faster PM reaction time, contrary to expectations. These results are discussed in terms of hyperfocus, which may have resulted from the nature of the laboratory task and setting. Future research should attempt to replicate and expand on these preliminary findings using larger sample sizes with a real-world PM measure to better understand how hyperfocus influences PM performance.

Rights

The author has granted New College of Florida the nonexclusive right to archive, make accessible, and distribute for educational purposes this work in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. The copyright of this work remains with the author.

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