The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 8.5 sweep (Focus@8) using the Attentional Control (Opposite Worlds) measure from the Test of Everyday Attention for Children (TEA-Ch).
Details on this measure and the data collected from the CMs are outlined in the table below.
| Domain: | Processing speed | |
| Measures: | Selective attention | |
| Cognitive flexibility | ||
| Processing speed | ||
| Executive functions | ||
| CHC: | Gs (Processing Speed) | |
| Gsm (Short-Term Memory) | ||
| Administration method: | Trained interviewer; clinical setting; oral answers | |
| Procedure: | A form of Stroop task. The child was shown a trail made up of the numbers 1 and 2 (with 24 numbers in total). The tester pointed to each number, one after the other, and the child delivered responses based on two conditions. In the 'same world' (control) condition, they read the numbers out as they were, as quickly as possible. In the 'opposite world' condition, the child had to say the opposite number to the one that was pointed to. A demonstration of each condition and a practice attempt at were administered first. There were four test trials: a same world trial, followed by two opposite world trials and finishing with another same world trial. | |
| Link to questionnaire: | http://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/researchers/our-data/clinical-measures/ (opens in new tab) | |
| Scoring: | Mean times for both same world and opposite world trials were calculated. A normative score is also available, however the ALSPAC codebook recommends this is used with caution, as the original sample used to create the normative scores was small (N = ~100). | |
| Item-level variable(s): | f8at200 - f8at230 | |
| Total score/derived variable(s): | f8at228, f8at229 | |
| Descriptives: | Same world | Opposite world |
| N = 7,208 | N = 7,202 | |
| Range = 7 - 91 | Range = 8.5 - 300 | |
| Mean = 13.11 | Mean = 17.46 | |
| SD = 3.05 | SD = 5.65 | |
(click image to enlarge) | (click image to enlarge) |
|
| Age of participants: | Mean = 103.82 months, SD = 3.92, Range = 89 - 127 | |
| Other sweep and/or cohort: | ALSPAC – Age 11.5 – TEA-Ch Attentional Control (Opposite Worlds) | |
| Source: | Robertson, I. H., Ward, T., Ridgeway, V., & Nimmo-Smith, I. (1996). The structure of normal human attention: The Test of Everyday Attention. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 2(6), 525-534. | |
| Manly, T., Anderson, V., Nimmo-Smith, I., Turner, A., Watson, P., & Robertson, I. H. (2001). The differential assessment of children's attention: The Test of Everyday Attention for Children (TEA-Ch), normative sample and ADHD performance. The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines, 42(8), 1065-1081. | ||
| Technical resources: | Heaton, S. C., Reader, S. K., Preston, A. S., Fennell, E. B., Puyana, O. E., Gill, N., & Johnson, J. H. (2001). The Test of Everyday Attention for Children (TEA-Ch): Patterns of performance in children with ADHD and clinical controls. Child Neuropsychology, 7(4), 251-264. | |
| Reference examples: | Chandramouli, L., Steer, C. D., Ellis, M., & Emond, A. M. (2009). Effects of early childhood lead exposure on academic performance and behaviour of school age children. Archives of Disease in Childhood, 94(11), 844-8. | |
| Odd, D. E., Emond, A., & Whitelaw, A. (2012). Long-term cognitive outcomes of infants born moderately and late preterm. Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology, 54(8), 704-709. | ||
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’.