Multi-target visual search organisation across the lifespan: cancellation task performance in a large and demographically stratified sample of healthy adults

ABSTRACT

Accurate tests of cognition are vital in (neuro)psychology. Cancellation tasks are popular tests of attention and executive function, in which participants find and ‘cancel’ targets among distractors. Despite extensive use in neurological patients, it remains unclear whether demographic variables (that vary among patients) affect cancellation performance. Here, we describe performance in 523 healthy participants of a web-based cancellation task. Age, sex, and level of education did not affect cancellation performance in this sample. We provide norm scores for indices of spatial bias, perseverations, revisits, processing speed, and search organisation. Furthermore, a cluster analysis identified four cognitive profiles among participants, characterised by many omissions (N=18), many revisits (N=18), relatively poor search organisation (N=125), and relatively good search organisation (N=362). Thus, patient scores pertaining to search organisation should be interpreted cautiously: Given the large proportion of healthy individuals with poor search organisation, disorganised search in patients might be pre-existing rather than disorder-related.

KEYWORDS:

• Cancellation test
• attention
• search organisation
• cognitive phenotyping
• norm scores

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Masud Husain for reading and commenting on an earlier version of this manuscript. ESD was supported through a European Union FP7 Marie Curie ITN grant (606901).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the FP7 People: Marie-Curie Actions [606901].