Unique designs, errors and strategies in the Five-Point Test: The contribution of age, phonemic fluency and visuospatial abilities in Italian children aged 6–11 years

Abstract

Performances on the Five-Point Test of 161 Italian children aged 6 to 11 years were investigated, along with phonemic fluency, visual-motor integration, visual perception, motor coordination, visuospatial memory, and fluid intelligence. Five-Point Test accuracy was significantly related to phonemic fluency and visual-motor integration, while phonemic fluency was linked to motor coordination. The two fluency measures increased linearly with age, but the developmental progression of Five-Point Test accuracy was less influenced by age. Different age effects were also found on the relationship between fluid intelligence and the two fluency measures. The inspection of qualitative aspects of Five-Point Test performance (errors and strategies) suggested that strategy usage enhanced both productivity and accuracy in children; age-related changes were observed in the relationship between the number of errors and the total number of designs produced.

Design Fluency in Children with ADHD and Comorbid Disorders

“…Interestingly, strategy was positively associated with productivity, but showed no effect on repetition scores. The use of strategy therefore seems to promote generativity, but not reduce repeated designs, as previously proposed [19]. Finally, we conducted a point-biserial correlation to determine if medication intake was associated with better scores on the FPT, as ADHD medication may have a long-term effect on the brain [103][104][105].…”

“…The task requires drawing as many different non-symbolic designs as possible in a limited amount of time by connecting dots with straight lines in each square of a matrix. Standard measures of design fluency include the total or correct number of designs, the total or ratio number of repeated designs (repetition errors), and the number of strategies [18], the latter supposedly helping quantify the use of a stratagem to promote design production while avoiding errors [19]. The design fluency five-point test (FPT [20]) was shown to be sensitive to frontal lobe damage in adults [21]: patients with neurological conditions produced fewer designs and more repeated designs than patients with psychiatric disorders, and repeated designs could also distinguish between anterior and posterior lesions and showed a tendency to distinguish between right and left anterior lesions-patients with right frontal lobe damage producing more repetitions.…”

Cognitive processes underlying arithmetical skills in primary school: the role of fluency, handwriting, number line and number acuity

“…Counting strategies involve finger counting, making a drawing and counting the items, and counting out loud, that can be considered as arithmetical abilities sustained by fluency (Grimes, 2014). Subdomains of fluency include phonemic fluency (i.e., generation of words that start with a specific letter), ideational fluency (i.e., generation of uses for specific objects) and visuospatial fluency (i.e., generation of unique patterns) (Fernandez, Moroni, Carranza, Fabbro, & Lebowitz, 2009;Stievano & Scalisi, 2014). Fluency that underlies the triggering of a process or a direct action to achieve a goal with sufficient speed and accuracy, may play a role in handwriting skills.…”

“…The Five Point Test (FPT) is a nonverbal EF measure to assess design fluency (Regard, Strauss, & Knapp, 1982;Stievano & Scalisi, 2014). According to Suchy, Kraybill and Gidley Larson (2010), the test measures initiation, planning and divergent reasoning of an individual assessed by the production of unique geometric designs or figures within a short time period (i.e.…”

Executive functions in children and adolescents

“…Longitudinal study designs are unique in the possibilities they offer to investigate developmental trajectories while limiting the influence of inter-individual differences that may confound possible age effects. However, next to their time-intensive nature, longitudinal studies include repeated assessments of the same tasks, potentially leading to practice effects on these tasks [75][76][77][78] .…”