Repeated Measurement of the Components of Attention With Young Children Using the Attention Network Test: Stability, Isolability, Robustness, and Reliability

Abstract

The current study examined the robustness, stability, reliability, and isolability of the attention network scores (alerting, orienting, and executive control) when young children experienced repeated administrations of the child version of the Attention Network Test (ANT; Rueda et al., 2004). Ten test sessions of the ANT were administered to 12 young children. Participants were asked to indicate the direction of a target fish, flanked by distractors, presented either above or below the fixation cross following different types of visual cues. Network scores, reflecting alerting, orienting, and executive control, were calculated using orthogonal subtractions of performance in selected conditions. Only the alerting network scores remained highly significant across the 10 sessions. The executive network scores showed some practice effects. The reliability of the network scores remained poor regardless of the amount of data. Based on the results, use of the ANT is cautioned against in young children when repeated testing is required.

Alertness and cognitive control: Is there a spatial attention constraint?

“…Rueda et al (2004) developed a child-friendly version of the ANT in which the stimuli were line drawings of fish that faced left or right, with the target fish flanked by congruent or incongruent distractor fish. Congruency effects were obtained, but they were not reliably modulated by the cues that preceded the stimuli, despite evidence that the cues increased alertness (see also Ishigami & Klein, 2015). Alerting-congruency interactions also appeared to be absent for children and adults who performed versions of the ANT with fish, schematic faces, or real faces as stimuli (Federico,Marotta,Adriani,9 Some readers might wonder about the probability of obtaining significant effects in all nine experiments, in light of analyses of the literature (e.g., Francis, 2014;Francis, Tanzman, & Matthews, 2014) that have revealed a prevalence of excess success in psychology studies (i.e., more significant effects in a set of experiments than would be expected, based on estimates of effect size and power).…”

Assessing the three attentional networks in children from three to six years: A child-friendly version of the Attentional Network Test for Interaction

“…The orienting network is believed to be stable during infancy and adulthood (from age 6; Gupta & Kar, 2009;Ishigami & Klein, 2015;Rueda et al, 2004), but it has a peak during adolescence (Mezzacappa, 2004). However, research on preschoolers has suggested that the results of the cueing conditions may not be as straightforward as initially claimed (Rueda et al, 2004).…”

“…Although the ANT is generally recommended for use with children as young as 4 years of age, only a few studies have focused on this particular age group and, to our knowledge, no study has used the ANT to evaluate children under the age of 4. Moreover, some studies that have included a preschool sample have found inconsistent results (Forns et al, 2014;Ishigami & Klein, 2015;Rueda et al, 2012).…”

Explaining the high working memory capacity of gifted children: Contributions of processing skills and executive control

“…The condition specifically dedicated at the estimation of the alerting and orienting networks performance could improve the measure of each attentional networks (Ishigami, & Klein, 2010). In addition, the ANT was often perceived as long and boring by the children (Ishigami & Klein, 2015). Although we had few omission errors, this boring aspect of this task can have an impact on children's motivation and on the accuracy of attentional measures.…”