The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 17.5 sweep (TeenFocus 4) using a measure of Working Memory (N-back Task).
Details on this measure and the data collected from the CMs are outlined in the table below.
| Years of data collection: | 2008-2011 |
| Domain: | Non-verbal memory |
| Measures: | Working memory |
| Executive function | |
| CHC: | Gsm (Short-Term Memory) |
| CLOSER Source: | Explore this sweep in CLOSER Discovery: ALSPAC Adolescence (13 years – 18 years 11 months) (opens in a new tab) |
| Administration method: | Trained interviewer; clinical setting; computer-assisted personal interview (CAPI) |
| Procedure: | In the N-Back task, participants were presented with a sequence of stimuli one-by-one. They had to decide whether the current stimulus was the same as the one presented N trials ago. In this case, N was either 1, 2, or 3 trials. The higher the number, the more difficult the task. Visuospatial stimuli (letters and numbers) were used in the trials. |
| Link to questionnaire: | http://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/researchers/our-data/clinical-measures/ (opens in new tab) |
| Scoring: | Mean accuracy and median reaction time. |
| Item-level variable(s): | Not readily available |
| Total score/derived variable(s): | FJNB001 – FJNB1000 Explore these variables in CLOSER Discovery: ALSPAC teen Focus 4 Clinic Dataset (opens in a new tab) |
| Descriptives: | Mean accuracy to identify non-targets (2-back condition) |
| N = 3,595 | |
| Range = 0.13 - 1 | |
| Mean = 0.72 | |
| SD = 0.23 | |
(click image to enlarge) |
|
| Age of participants (months): | Mean = 213.59 months, SD = 5.46, Range = 195 - 240 |
| Other sweep and/or cohort: | None |
| Source: | Kirchner, W. K. (1958). Age differences in short-term retention of rapidly changing information. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 55(4), 352. |
| Technical resources: | None |
| Example articles: | Wardle, M. C., De Wit, H., Penton-Voak, I., Lewis, G., & Munafo, M. R. (2013). Lack of association between COMT and working memory in a population-based cohort of healthy young adults. Neuropsychopharmacology, 38(7), 1253. |
| Sinclair, L. I., Button, K. S., Munafò, M. R., Day, I. N., & Lewis, G. (2015). Possible association of APOE genotype with working memory in young adults. PloS One, 10(8), e0135894. |
For the named items in the table above, links are provided to their corresponding content on CLOSER Discovery. Where a variable range is provided, full variable lists can be accessed through the ‘Variable Groups’ tab on the linked Discovery page.
Go to:
- Overview of all cognitive measures in ALSPAC
- Overview of childhood cognitive measures across all studies
This page is part of CLOSER’s ‘A guide to the cognitive measures in five British birth cohort studies’.