This was a retrospective look back at 31 right-handed boys aged 12 to 17 with a DSM-5 ADHD diagnosis. All of them had earlier taken part in a trial that used fMRI-neurofeedback, where people try to change activity in a target brain region while watching a live signal of it. Most of the boys (24) were on stable stimulant medication during the training.
The study checked what, measured before training, went with learning to self-regulate. Better learning went with more baseline activity in one set of front and deep brain regions during a stop task. Poorer learning went with more activity in some rear and lower brain regions. Baseline clinical scores showed no link.
When the boys were split into groups, just under half were counted as successful learners (15 of 31, or 48.4%). Faster reaction time on two attention tasks was the only baseline score that predicted being a learner. The authors say brain measures predicted learning better than clinical or cognitive ones.
The sample was small, only boys, and most were medicated, and the cut-off for calling someone a learner was chosen by the authors. The analysis was retrospective and looked only at links.
Handoff: rules applied as written from set 2026-09-12a. Body is 213 words. I kept the two qualifying counts the extract emphasizes (48.4% learner split; small/medicated/retrospective caveats) and translated the notation into plain terms. I deliberately dropped the raw correlation and effect-size figures (r, p, OR, d, SMD-style values) rather than stack statistics, since the finding reads clearly in words and the rules bar opening or crowding sentences with numbers; flag if you want the odds ratio or the ADHD-RS reduction (d = 0.63, which applied equally to both groups) restored. No rule I expected was absent.
Source: Sheut-Ling Lam, Marion Criaud, Analucía A. Alegría, et al.. Neurofunctional and behavioural measures associated with fMRI-neurofeedback learning in adolescents with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. NeuroImage Clinical (2020). doi:10.1016/j.nicl.2020.102291