ALSPAC – Age 8.5 – Test of Everyday Attention for Children (TEA-Ch) Attentional Control (Opposite Worlds)

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.

Years of data collection:	1999-2001
Domain:	Processing speed
Measures:	Selective attention
	Cognitive flexibility
	Processing speed
	Executive functions
CHC:	Gs (Processing Speed)
	Gsm (Short-Term Memory)
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; 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 = approx. 100).
Item-level variable(s):	f8at200-f8at230
Total score/derived variable(s):	f8at228, f8at229 Explore these variables in CLOSER Discovery: ALSPAC Focus at 8 Clinic Dataset (opens in a new tab)
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 (months):	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.
Example articles:	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.