Statistical analysis of cognitive performance in children

Research into executive functions (EF) has increasingly adopted a multivariate approach in which groups of tests are administered to adults or children in order to assess the structure of these processes. Within such tasks participants perform multiple trials to assess each component of EF skill. Most studies simply aggregate scores to identify the underlying construct. In this talk we assess change in performance of young children on repeated measures of executive functions, taking into account the sampling distributions associated with the individual measurements. We will examine a study in which 115 children were administered a battery of EF and social understanding at three time intervals, six months apart. The analyses reveal that children’s success on individual tasks is strongly influenced by their previous performance on test trials and the order in which tasks were administered. At the very least such findings raise questions about the validity of research in which large numbers of tests are administered to children within a battery.