ALSPAC – Age 7.5 – Letter Decision Task

The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 7.5 sweep (Focus@7) using the Letter Decision Task.

Details on this measure and the data collected from the CMs are outlined in the table below.

Years of data collection:	1998-2000
Domain:	Visual scanning
Measures:	Visual scanning
	Visual processing
CHC:	Gs (Processing Speed)
	Gv (Visual Processing)
CLOSER Source:	Explore this sweep in CLOSER Discovery: ALSPAC Childhood (5 years to 12 years 11 months) (opens in a new tab)
Administration method:	Trained interviewer; clinical setting; pen and paper
Procedure:	The child was presented with a series of shapes, half of which were real letters, and half which were non-letters (including reversed letters). They were instructed to go through the list, placing a tick next to genuine letters and a cross next to non-letters. The speed of completion was recorded. This test was completed only by children who had struggled with other tasks, and thus the sample is considerably biased.
Link to questionnaire:	http://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/researchers/our-data/clinical-measures/ (opens in new tab)
Scoring:	The main score was the number of correct responses (0 – 40)
Item-level variable(s):	Not readily available
Total score/derived variable(s):	f7ws300 – f7ws348 Explore these variables in CLOSER Discovery: ALSPAC Focus at 7 Clinic Dataset (opens in a new tab)
Descriptives:	N = 586
	Range = 0 – 40
	Mean = 34.19
	SD = 5.71
	(click image to enlarge)
Age of participants (months):	Mean = 90.5 months, SD =3.83, Range = 82 – 113
Other sweep and/or cohort:	None
Source:	(Gathercole & Baddeley, 1997, personal communication)
Technical resources:	None
Example articles:	None

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.