Which Factors Influence Attentional Functions? Attention Assessed by KiTAP in 105 6-to-10-Year-Old Children

Abstract

This research revealed the children with difficulties in attentional functions among healthy children attending primary school and aimed to identify the possible sociodemographic factors, such as the child’s age, gender, and school grade, that could influence attentive performance. The participants were 105 children aged 6–10 years (M age = 8.6; SD = 1.04), attending primary schools. Family economic condition was mostly at a medium level (63.5%), and parents most frequently had 13 years of schooling. The computerized test KiTAP was administered to children to assess their attentional functions. Results showed a higher frequency of omissions and false alarms and a reduced speed in alertness, go/no-go, and sustained attention tasks compared to Italian norms. Hierarchical regression analyses were run with school grade, gender, and current age as independent variables and mean reaction times (and standard deviation), number of omissions, and false alarms as dependent ones. The results showed that male gender and attending a lower grade impacted on lower attentional performance in several subtests. Girls showed the best performances in tests of distractibility and impulsive reaction tendencies, while higher school grade positively influenced divided and sustained attention. These results could be useful to identify children with major attentional difficulties, and some recommendations for future studies and the implementation of attention empowerment programmes are proposed.

A Web-Based Time-Use Application to Assess Diet and Movement Behavior in Asian Schoolchildren: Development and Usability Study of My E-Diary for Activities and Lifestyle (MEDAL)

“…Studies have shown that boys have lower attentional performance and poorer inhibitory control but perform faster than girls [50]. Consistent with these findings, we found that girls spent more time completing MEDAL (median 15 min per day vs 13 min per day), but they were more agreeable to the time spent on MEDAL compared with boys.…”

Who Benefits from An Intervention Program on Foundational Skills for Handwriting Addressed to Kindergarten Children and First Graders?

“…Longitudinal studies examining the relationship between visual-motor skills and academic achievement demonstrate that third grade literacy [27], math and spelling scores [28] are predicted on the basis of early eye-hand coordination tasks. These results suggest that academic tasks and school demands require abilities to process visual clues, perceive spatial relations among objects and integrate visual information with fine finger movements to assure successful behaviors in the classroom and academic achievements [20,29].…”

Impact of Psycho-Educational Activities on Visual-Motor Integration, Fine Motor Skills and Name Writing among First Graders: A Kinematic Pilot Study

“…Numerous studies have analyzed the relationship between fine motor skills (hereafter FMS) and the main predictors of writing performances. Handwriting performance has been reported to be influenced from visual perception, eye-hand coordination, and visual-motor integration [9][10][11][12]. For example, previous studies investigating the association between visual-perception and handwriting outcomes have demonstrated that visual-motor integration is a significant component of writing performance [11,[13][14][15][16][17].…”