The NIH Toolbox Cognition Battery: Results from a large normative developmental sample (PING).

Abstract

Objective The NIH Toolbox Cognition Battery (NTCB) was designed to provide a brief, efficient computerized test of key neuropsychological functions appropriate for use in children as young as 3 years of age. This report describes the performance of a large group of typically developing children and adolescents and examines the impact of age and sociocultural variables on test performance. Method The NTCB was administered to a sample of 1020 typically developing males and females ranging in age from 3 to 20 years, diverse in terms of socioeconomic status (SES) and race/ethnicity, as part of the new publicly accessible Pediatric Imaging, Neurocognition, and Genetics (PING) data resource, at 9 sites across the United States. Results General additive models of nonlinear age-functions were estimated from age-differences in test performance on the 8 NTCB subtests while controlling for family SES and genetic ancestry factors (GAFs). Age accounted for the majority of the variance across all NTCB scores, with additional significant contributions of gender on some measures, and of SES and race/ethnicity (GAFs) on all. After adjusting for age and gender, SES and GAFs explained a substantial proportion of the remaining unexplained variance in Picture Vocabulary scores. Conclusions The results highlight the sensitivity to developmental effects and efficiency of this new computerized assessment battery for neurodevelopmental research. Limitations are observed in the form of some ceiling effects in older children, some floor effects, particularly on executive function tests in the youngest participants, and evidence for variable measurement sensitivity to cultural/socioeconomic factors.

LearningRx Cognitive Training Effects in Children Ages 8–14: A Randomized Controlled Trial

“…A validation of the Flanker Test with a pediatric population resulted in convergent validity of just .34 when compared with the D‐KEFS Inhibition test, and also found significant practice effects from repeated testing (Zelazo et al, 2013). Further, Akshoomoff et al (2014) found significant ceiling effects in older children when conducting a large normative study on the cognition battery. Unfortunately, the use of the NIH Cognition Toolbox does not facilitate strong conclusions about the efficacy of the ThinkRx program on selective attention.…”

Individual differences in frontolimbic circuitry and anxiety emerge with adolescent changes in endocannabinoid signaling across species

“…Details on the recruitment, ascertainment, behavioral, genetic, and neuroimaging methods and acquisition in the PING Study are summarized below (details are in refs. [43][44][45][46]. All participants provided informed consent (age 18 y old and older) or parental informed consent with child assent (ages 7-17 y old) in accordance with policies of the Institutional Review Boards of the sites of participation.…”

Genomic ancestry, cognitive ability, and socioeconomic outcomes

“…We utilized data from the PING (Pediatric Imaging, Neurocognition, and Genetics; (Akshoomoff et al, 2014)) dataset. PING is a neuroscientific dataset based on a large sample (n = 1,493) of healthy American children and youths, ages 3 to 21, of diverse ancestries.…”

“…The cognitive sub-domain assessed by each test, along with the subtests' psychometric characteristics, are detailed by Akshoomoff et al (2014) Some data were missing (5% of cells, 16% of cases had at least 1 missing datapoint). We imputed values for cases that were missing less than half of their datapoints rounded down (3 or fewer).…”

“…These ancestry estimates were calculated using the ADMIXTURE algorithm based on more than 16k SNPs and are thus very likely to be highly reliable (see for details, Akshoomoff et al, 2014). Ancestry was assigned to 6 clusters corresponding to Europeans, Africans, Amerindian (Native Americans), East Asians, Oceanians and Central Asians.…”