Assessment of cognition in an adolescent Indigenous population

Abstract

The assessment of cognition in Indigenous populations is often complicated by cultural and language differences and unfamiliarity with the assessment process. Cognitive tasks are being developed that reduce the impact of these factors. These processes need to be evaluated in different cultural and ethnic groups to determine whether they are appropriate. Such an assessment was recently used in two studies of cognition of 237 Indigenous Australian adolescents (age: M = 16.06 ± 2.16 years). The tasks were completed appropriately, with response times and error rates increasing for difficult tasks. Duration and error rates decreased for the round-based tasks, in line with performance in non-Indigenous samples. There were no gender effects. Age associations occurred in some tasks, but significant correlations were only of a small magnitude. Although the battery appeared to be completed appropriately in this study, more work needs to be conducted examining the influence of demographic factors to ensure that control data can be most appropriately matched in future studies.

Key words:

• Adolescence
• cognitive assessment
• cognitive processes
• cross-cultural psychology
• Indigenous

Acknowledgements

This paper was supported by a grant from the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (grant number: 383587).