Neuropsychological screening with TOWI: Performance in 6- to 12-year-old children

Abstract

Videogames represent an exciting development in neuropsychological assessment of cognitive function. Here, we used TOWI, a series of games based on standardized tests, to evaluate the cognitive performance of a large sample of school-age children. We compared the metrics produced by TOWI with the performance metrics reported for the standardized tests that inspired each of these tasks. We found ascending values together with age for scores reflecting correct answers and descending values together with age for scores reflecting completion times, mistakes or missed entries. Sensitivity to developmental changes, similarities with standardized tests of task metrics contribute to the validity of TOWI as a screening tool.

Keywords:

• Video games
• gamification
• cognitive development

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all participants for their contribution to this study. Also, we would like to recognize the detailed suggestions made by two anonymous reviewers which have contributed to greatly improving the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

MFR has done unpaid consulting for TOWI games. CM is a graduate student of MFR and assisted with the statistical analysis. MFGT and RA wrote and executed the experimental protocol described here. MFGT received an honorarium derived from the UNICEF grant. MGA discloses no conflicts of interest.

Data availability statement

Data and R code are available at: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12159171.v1, https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12159162.v1 and https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12159102.v1

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by UNICEF under Grant SC160365.