This study investigated psychometric properties (standardization and validity) of the Rey Complex Figure Organizational Strategy Score (RCF-OSS) in a sample of 217 healthy children aged 5-7 years. Our results showed that RCF-OSS performance changes significantly between 5 and 7 years of age. While most 5-year-olds used a local approach when copying the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure (ROCF), 7-year-olds increasingly adopted a global approach. RCF-OSS performance correlated significantly, but moderately with measures of ROCF accuracy, executive functioning (fluency, working memory, reasoning), and non-executive functioning (visual-motor integration, visual attention, processing speed, numeracy). These findings seem to indicate that RCF-OSS performance reflects a range of cognitive skills at 5 to 7 years of age, including aspects of executive and non-executive functioning.
To investigate developmental changes that take place in verbal fluency (VF) performance during early childhood, a VF task was administered to 225 healthy, Dutch-speaking children aged between 4.14 and 6.89 years. Three categories of VF outcome measures were included: i.e., word productivity, mean cluster size, and number of switches. Age influenced performance on all VF outcome measures linearly; i.e., older children produced more words, made longer clusters, and switched more. Higher levels of intelligence were associated with increased VF word productivity, but not with measures of switching and clustering. When leaving intelligence out of these analyses, we additionally found an interaction between level of parental education (LPE) and sex on total word productivity, i.e., girls with parents who had lower LPE produced fewer words than the other children. Furthermore, a similar interaction of LPE and sex was found for the number of switches: i.e., girls who had parents with lower LPE made fewer switches than the other children. Findings suggest that even in 4 to 6-year-old children important changes take place over time in VF and in processes underlying successful performance. Attention should be paid to age-extrinsic factors, such as LPE and sex, since these have been found to influence VF performance in young children.
Findings indicate that transfer of strategy instruction from one complex figure to another is only present for organization of recalled information. The increase in RCF-OSS scores did not lead to a higher accuracy or a faster copy or recall.
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