Congratulations to Alessio Bellato for passing his PhD. Alessio is a member of CANDAL and works as a Teaching Associate for the MSc Mental Health: Research and Practice (University of Nottingham). 

Alessio's doctoral project: ‘An investigation of autonomic arousal and attentional mechanisms in children with ADHD and Autism’ was supervised by Professor Chris Hollis and Dr Maddie Groom. 106 children between 7 and 15 years of age were recruited, and performed a battery of experimental paradigms (including eye-tracking and electroencephalography), while parent-reported measures were used to evaluate the severity of symptoms of ADHD, Autism, and other psychiatric conditions.

Alessio found that people with ADHD seem to struggle more with up-regulating arousal, maintaining their attention to the environment and extracting relevant information, while people with Autism are more likely to experience hyper-reactivity and sensitivity, resulting in difficulties to down-regulate arousal according to the contextual demands. People with co-occurring ADHD and Autism might find it difficult to maintain attention in different situations, and together experience excessive distractibility and hyper-reactivity to sensory stimulation, struggling to focus on the tasks or the ongoing activity and displaying general difficulties in carrying out everyday life activities. This study might therefore inform the design of future research studies to further disentangle the relationships between arousal, attention and behaviour in ADHD and Autism.