Ernest "Mark" Mahone (born September 19, 1961) is an American pediatric neuropsychologist.
Biography
Mahone was born September 19, 1961 to Leonard Ray Mahone Jr. and Jacqueline Joan Healthcote.
Mahone married Sue Ellen Gould, on March 27, 1986; together they have two children, Andrew Mark Mahone and Evan Lori Mahone.
Mahone received a Bachelor of Science in elementary education from the University of Maryland in 1983 and a master's degree in 1985. While studying for his Ph.D. in counseling psychology at the State University of New York at Albany, he worked as a clinical psychology intern with the National Naval Medical Center from 1989 to 1990. After earning his degree in 1990, he began a post-doctoral fellowship in a clinical neuropsychology at Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School Department of Psychiatry.
He is board certified in clinical neuropsychology and is a licensed psychologist in the state of Maryland.
He is an editorial board member for Child Neuropsychology Assessment, Developmental Neuropsychology, Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology, Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, and Clinical Neuropsychologist.
Research
Mahone's research focuses on Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), movement disorders, learning disabilities, spina bifida, childhood cancer, prenatal alcohol exposure, and sleep disorders; his primary research focus is on children with ADHD. He is currently conducting research studies at the Kennedy Krieger Institute on typically developing boys ages 9–14, children ages 4–5 with and without ADHD, children ages 5–9 with and without ADHD, and parents of children who have been diagnosed with ADHD. Mahone recently received a grant to study the development of ADHD in preschool children.
ADHD
School age
In his article, "The Effects of ADHD (Beyond Decoding Accuracy) on Reading Fluency and Comprehension", Mahone outlines the ways that ADHD can impair school-age children academically. Multitasking, reading comprehension, processing speed, motor skills, and working memory tend to work normally in children without ADHD; however, those with ADHD experience deficits in all of these areas. Children with ADHD have a hard time multitasking, which in an academic setting means that they have difficulty listening to their teacher and taking notes simultaneously. Mahone suggests that teachers let ADHD students either record lessons or provide them with outlines of lessons in order to aid their understanding of the material. Reading and reading comprehension are the academic areas that ADHD children tend to have the most trouble with. Mahone believes that it is working memory deficits that inhibit ADHD students from fully comprehending the main points of reading material; children with ADHD tend to get distracted by smaller, less relevant details, which results in their inability to fully comprehend what they read as a whole. Students with ADHD also have trouble processing information as fast as those without ADHD, which results in slower reading and writing pace; since children with ADHD can become distracted during long assignments they are slower at processing the information. Because of time pressure, tests are especially difficult for children with ADHD, and they are more likely to experience fatigue as a result of their slow processing speed and deficient motor skills.