Assessment of Motivation, Effort, and Self-regulation (AMES): A Novel Tablet Computer Assessment Battery

• In Event: 1-144 - Executive Functions in Flux: Contextualising our Approaches for the Real World

Integrative Statement

The introduction of mass market tablet computers has paved the way for to researchers to take portable, computerized assessments of executive functions (EFs) into naturalistic settings. These assessments have a number of important advantages that include improved measurement quality (e.g., precise reaction time data; Magnus, Willoughby, Blair, & Kuhn, 2017), greater ecological validity, reduced data collection costs, and scalability (e.g., enabling group assessments in classrooms; Obradović et al., 2018). We have created a new tablet-based assessment battery for iOS that assesses frustration tolerance and delay of gratification skills in addition to EFs. We report results from a field study validating this new assessment by examining the relations among these skills, exploring age-related changes in performance, and relating children’s performance to parents’ reports of self-regulation.

Data collection is still ongoing. Thus far, 375 children (age 4–12 years) have completed at least one tablet task and 257 parents have filled out questionnaires. Children were assessed at museums and summer camps and parents completed a survey in person or online. Parent surveys included questions about their children’s self-regulation adapted from existing measures such as the Children’s Behavior Questionnaire (Rothbart et al., 2001). We report on data from three tasks: (1) Hearts and Flowers (Davidson et al., 2006) is an EF task that measures inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility; (2) the Choice Delay Task (Sonuga-Barke, 1992) measures delay of gratification; and (3) Color Dot is new task that measures frustration tolerance. This task has two blocks: In the first block, points are awarded for every dot the child touches. In the second block, points are awarded only 20% of the time. Frustration tolerance was calculated as the difference between response rates across the two blocks.

Correlations are presented in Table 1. Age-related differences in performance were observed for all tasks. Age exhibited strong correlations with EFs and moderate correlations with delay of gratification and frustration tolerance. The EF scores were correlated with both delay of gratification and frustration tolerance, but frustration tolerance and delay of gratification were unrelated. Parents’ reports of child self-regulation were negatively correlated with anticipatory responses during hearts and flowers and impulsive button pressing behavior during the choice delay task.

We are introducing a new tablet-based direct assessment of intrapersonal socioemotional skills that includes EFs. Our results provide information about how these skills are related to each other, and that our tasks are sensitive to age-related changes in performance. This battery will ultimately include two additional tasks, which are currently in development: a working memory assessment and a puzzle task assessing challenge preference. To facilitate broader adoption of this battery, the iOS app includes extensive menus for customizing the settings (including language selection), and we will be releasing the software under an open source license. Similar to other tablet-based EF assessments (e.g., Obradović et al., 2018), this assessment can be administered in group settings such as classrooms to facilitate large scale data collection in educational contexts.

Authors

• Michael Sulik, Stanford University
  Presenting Author

• Jelena Obradovic, Stanford University
  Non-Presenting Author