Oades, R. D., Wild-Wall, N., & Juran, S., (2005).
Fronto-cingular mechanisms, development and mismatch processes in normal subjects and patients with ADHD growing up: cognitive ERPs and anatomy.
Australian Journal of Psychology, in press. (Proceedings of the Australian Society for Psychophysiology, Melbourne, Dec. 2004)

Introduction: ADHD problems begin in early childhood and manifest sooner or later with difficulties in selective information processing. But there is a poor understanding of the maturation of anatomical bases and the neurobiology of the processes through adolescence to adulthood.

Three negative-going ERPs reflecting automatic attentional mechanisms and the threshold to controlled processing are taken as markers to illustrate the development and the process.

Results:
a) Mismatch negativity (MMN), a measure of auditory change detection, proves to be a marker of early anomalous asymmetric development in frontal regions in ADHD subjects. Brain electrical source analysis suggests that changes of frontal and cingulate dipole sources may be expected normally into the third decade of life. .
b) The N2 component, sensitive to the categorization of stimulus-type, has a poorly expressed frontal topography after imperative stop-signals in subjects with ADHD independent of response success. .
c) Indeed, the error-related negativity (Ne) associated with mistakes is poorly expressed in ADHD subjects. Ne sources like those for MMN implicate inferior-mid frontal and mid-cingulate locations - regions subject to maturation at puberty, and beyond in young "adults"..

Conclusions: Functionally, in childhood ADHD, the interaction of these regions in “pre-executive” processing seems impaired (responsiveness to deviance, significance and feedback). But studies of older ADHD subjects should note that there is a potential for the putative 'maturation-lag' of the mediating structures continuing into young adulthood.