Anne Fleur Kortekaas-Rijlaarsdam

CHAPTER 5 110 this knowledge in a novel context. As children constantly need to apply previously learned knowledge to novel contexts, our findings suggest that impairments in generalization may result in impaired performance, for example at school. Moreover, while the acquisition of stimulus-response associations using reward and penalty in a lab context seems intact in children with ADHD compared to controls (but see Frank et al., 2007; Groen et al., 2008; Luman et al., 2009), this does not guarantee that learning from reward and penalty is intact in daily life, given that in daily life learning stimulus- response associations is often much more complicated (e.g. more distraction; more stimulus-response associations need to be learned at once; feedback is less consistent). Although medication treatment may speed up learning of novel associations, most potential for treatment seems to lie in improving generalization of stimulus-reward associations to a novel context, although the strength of this effect is small- to medium and more research is necessary to confirm our findings. Future research should also look at the mechanism behind improvements in generalization of knowledge.