Establishing Normative Data for the Number Cancelation Test Among Children in Kindergartens and Primary Schools in China

Abstract

This study aimed to suggest an attention assessment tool using a Digital Pen for measuring the temporal-spatial parameters during the Number Cancelation Test (NCT), and then to establish the normative data for the NCT among children in kindergartens and primary schools in China by recruiting a total of 989 children (496 males). Four measures, i.e., selective attention (SA), speed of cognitive processing (SpC), averaged time of circlings (ATC), and averaged circumference of circled curves (ACCC), were proposed to evaluate the NCT performance. They basically have a development trend with fast speed in the beginning before Grade 1 or 2 of primary schools, and then enter an extremely slow development period (with ceiling or floor effect). SA and SpC have gender and grade main effects, while ATC and ACCC have the grade main effect, only. In particular, females have higher SA scores than males in middle class of kindergarten, and Grade 2–Grade 5 of primary school, but no gender differences in other grades; females have higher SpC scores than males in middle class of kindergarten, and Grade 3–4 of primary school, but no gender differences in other grades. More importantly, in clinical practice, if SA or SpC measure of a child is below than the 5th centile (i.e., p5 level) of his/her grade-specific normative data, then this child may be predicted to have a high-risk of learning disabilities. Findings suggest that the proposed method can be used for early screening of learning disabilities by setting appropriate cut-off values.

Entropy of eye movement during rapid automatized naming

“…As a second experimental task, a number cancelation test (NCT) ( Xie et al, 2022 ) was conducted to measure a participant’s RAN-related abilities. The examiner sat in front of a participant and presented the participant with a standard B5-size paper showing a series of numbers arranged in organized arrays with 26 rows and 40 columns.…”

“…The participant, who hold a Digital Pen (with an embedded smart mini-camera), was required to find the number “3” (the targeted number) and then draw a circle on it, but ignore all other numbers (distractors), as quickly as possible within 2 min. The technical advantage of the Digital Pen was the usage of a smart mini-camera, designed to measure the temporal-spatial features from the perspective of handwriting kinematics, such as pre-movement time (initiating), movement time (moving pen to a stimulus), drawing time (completing a cancelation), circumference of a drawn curve, real-time spatial positions (trajectory) of drawing, and the time sequence of drawings ( Xie et al, 2022 ). It should be remarked ( Xie et al, 2022 ) that the temporal-spatial features may gain better performance than traditional measures of NCT (e.g., the number of omissions, the number of correct responses, the total number of cancelations, and completion time).…”

“…The Digital Pen (with an embedded smart mini-camera) can be used to measure a number of temporal-spatial features during NCT ( Xie et al, 2022 ). In this study, we selected only three parameters ( Xie et al, 2022 ) to evaluate individuals’ performance during the NCT. Those parameters were defined as follows.…”

“…As the third target, we used the Pearson’s approach to investigate the association between EME and measures of the NCT ( Xie et al, 2022 ), and that between EME and traditional measure (e.g., TTN) of eye movements in three conditions.…”

“…Taken together, we suggested an entropy-based method to measure eye movements for the first time, which first mapped eye movements during RAN in a time-series and then analyzed the time-series by a proper definition of entropy from the perspective of information theory. By recruiting 408 children (206 males, aged 7–11 years), we aimed to: (i) Test whether the entropy of eye movements can gain better performance than traditional measures [e.g., total time of naming (TTN)] of eye movements; (ii) test whether the entropy of eye movements has a developmental trend in children across the age stages; (iii) test whether the entropy of eye movements may change with the task complexity of RAN; and (iv) investigate the association between the entropy of eye movements and the RAN-related skills evaluated by the number cancelation test ( Xie et al, 2022 ), and between that and traditional measures (e.g., TTN) of eye movements.…”