1. The AttentionTrip: A game-like tool for measuring the networks of attention
- Author
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Graham Wilson, Raymond M. Klein, Tariq Hassan, Yoko Ishigami, and Jonathan Mulle
- Subjects
Adult ,Male ,Adolescent ,Control (management) ,Neuropsychological Tests ,050105 experimental psychology ,Session (web analytics) ,Task (project management) ,Young Adult ,03 medical and health sciences ,Repeated testing ,0302 clinical medicine ,Attention network ,Reaction Time ,Humans ,Attention ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,Analysis of Variance ,General Neuroscience ,05 social sciences ,Reproducibility of Results ,Executive functions ,Test (assessment) ,Games, Experimental ,Auditory Perception ,Visual Perception ,Female ,Cues ,Psychology ,Social psychology ,030217 neurology & neurosurgery ,Cognitive psychology - Abstract
Background Recognizing that attention is not a unitary system, the Attention Network Test (ANT) and its variants were developed to measure the efficacy of the multiple components of attention. One potential weakness of these tests (ANTs) is that they are unengaging. This poses a problem when particular groups are tested (e.g., young children), when more stable measures of performance are desirable (and can only be achieved in longer testing sessions) and when repeated testing is necessary. New method Here we describe the evolution of a game-like tool, which we call the AttentionTrip©, that is suitable for investigating three isolable attentional networks (alerting, orienting, and executive functions). Results Utilizing this tool we were able to generate reasonable network scores for alerting, executive control (from both the flanker and Simon effects), endogenous orienting and, after some motivated modifications, exogenous orienting. Comparison with existing method(s) Split-half reliabilities of the alerting and executive (flanker) network scores were considerably higher than those reported by MacLeod et al. (2010) in their psychometric review of the ANT. Informal observations (e.g., some participants asking if they could keep doing the task when their session was over) suggesting that the AttentionTrip is considerably more engaging than the traditional ANT have been confirmed in a head-to-head comparison (Vallis & Klein, 2016). Conclusions The AttentionTrip@ is available now for research purposes. A tablet version, which will have greater clinical utility, is under development.
- Published
- 2017