Test–retest reliability and convergent validity of attention measures

ABSTRACT

Recently, numerous pretest–posttest study designs have evaluated attention impairments and effectiveness of attention training. However, some of the attention tasks used in these studies show a lack of temporal stability analysis that reduces confidence in attention training outcomes. We aim to analyze the temporal stability within three attention tasks using different measures of attention (speed measures, accuracy measures, and global attention indexes) and the convergent validity between the measures. A total of 178 university students completed three attention tasks with a time interval of one week. Speed measures of attention showed higher test–retest reliability and higher convergence than accuracy measures. Accuracy measures showed nonnormal distributions and small range of variability to provide sufficient discrimination. Speed measures showed high practice effects. These results are consistent with previous studies of temporal stability and convergent validity of attention tasks. However, further studies of commonly used attention tasks are necessary in healthy and clinical samples. Additionally, attention training studies should include a control group to subtract the practice effect of speed measures.

KEYWORDS:

• Accuracy
• attention task
• convergent validity
• speed
• test-retest reliability

Acknowledgment

The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support for DiViSA test administration from TEA Ediciones. We also would like to acknowledge to the UAM-PSiÐ research group for the objective attention measures support.