ABSTRACT

Attentional abilities affect the social, cognitive, and intellectual growth of human development. Tools for the assessment of attention can facilitate the early diagnosis of attention disorders and thereby earlier interventions and improvements. The Attention Network Test (ANT) is a well-established, computerized task that measures the three networks of attention: alerting, orienting, and executive functioning. Unfortunately, the ANT is not very engaging. Maintaining engagement is important in assessments of attention, particularly when repeated assessments are required, and may be challenging with child populations. This project compares youth engagement on a child-friendly version of the ANT (ANT-C) with a recently developed video-game-like task called AttentionTrip©. Whereas both tasks generated robust network scores, there was a strong advantage for AttentionTrip© on measures of engagement. This extends previous findings that the AttentionTrip© task is an appropriate alternative for participants who are prone to boredom or mind-wandering.

摘要

注意能力影响人类发展的社会，认知和智力发展。注意力评估工具可以促进注意力障碍的早期诊断，从而促进早期干预和改善。注意网络测试（ANT）是一项完善的计算机化任务，它可以测量三个注意网络：警报，定向和执行功能。不幸的是，ANT并不是很吸引人。保持敬业度对评估注意力至关重要，尤其是在需要重复评估的情况下，这可能对儿童群体构成挑战。该项目将青少年对儿童友好型ANT（ANT-C）的参与与最近开发的名为AttentionTrip©的类似视频游戏的任务进行了比较。两项任务均产生了稳定的网络得分，AttentionTrip©在参与度方面有很大优势。这扩展了以前的研究结果是，AttentionTrip©任务是为与会者谁是容易感到无聊或头脑徘徊适当的替代。