Comparing Youth Engagement on the AttentionTrip to the Child Attention Network Test

ABSTRACT

Attentional abilities affect the social, cognitive, and intellectual growth of human development. Tools for the assessment of attention can facilitate the early diagnosis of attention disorders and thereby earlier interventions and improvements. The Attention Network Test (ANT) is a well-established, computerized task that measures the three networks of attention: alerting, orienting, and executive functioning. Unfortunately, the ANT is not very engaging. Maintaining engagement is important in assessments of attention, particularly when repeated assessments are required, and may be challenging with child populations. This project compares youth engagement on a child-friendly version of the ANT (ANT-C) with a recently developed video-game-like task called AttentionTrip©. Whereas both tasks generated robust network scores, there was a strong advantage for AttentionTrip© on measures of engagement. This extends previous findings that the AttentionTrip© task is an appropriate alternative for participants who are prone to boredom or mind-wandering.

Acknowledgments

We thank Sana Rehan, Ralph Redden, Brett Feltmate, John Christie, and our team members at the Klein lab for their support in facilitating this research.

Disclosure of potential conflict of interest

None.

Data availability statement

Data for this project are hosted on the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/avmxd/ DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/AVMXD.

Notes

1. Note: All supplementary materials including consent documents, raw data, analysis scripts, engagement survey graphics and questions are hosted on the Open Science Framework Repository at: https://osf.io/65ryd/

2. In creating a shorter version of the task that was not balanced for turns, target types were not efficiently balanced across the three wheel orientations. This error did not compromise our engagement scores. But to generate network scores in which we could have greater confidence, we asked participants to return to complete a balanced version. Only thirteen of these participants returned at a later date to complete the balanced version of the task. As the overall task was similar to the desired paradigm we conducted a mixed ANOVA with balanced status as a between-subjects factor and cue, tone and flankers as within-subjects factors. As neither the main effect of group (balance) nor its interaction with any of the within-subjects factors were significant, all twenty-one participants were included in the analysis.

Additional information

Funding

This project was made possible by funding from the National Science and Engineering Research Council's Discovery Grant (RGPIN 2016-04979) and Nova Scotia Health Research Foundation’s Catalyst Award (CATALYST-2016-1189) were both awarded to Raymond Klein.

Notes on contributors

Swasti Arora

Swasti Arora is presently the laboratory manager for the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Lab of Dr. Raymond Klein at Dalhousie University. She hopes to pursue graduate training to further explore her research interests, which include attention, cognition, knowledge translation, education, and epistemological considerations in applied and cross-cultural psychology.

Colin R. McCormick

Colin R. McCormick is a PhD student studying cognitive science at Dalhousie University, under supervisors Dr. Raymond Klein and Dr. Tracy Taylor-Helmick. His primary academic interests include temporal attention, alerting, vigilance, gamification of cognitive tools, and open science practices.

Raymond M. Klein

Raymond M. Klein is an internationally recognized expert on human attention. Best known for his basic research, he has also regularly sought to apply his expertise in experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience to real-world problems such as air, road and offshore safety, attention deficits, eye-witness testimony and teaching drawing.