Developmental changes in attention performance and their relationship to behavior and school problems

Assessing children’s attention capacities over time and in relationship to broader functioning may provide information about the contribution of emergent attention difficulties to later generalized problems with behavior and learning. The purpose of this study was to describe the developmental progression of attention and executive functions in early school-aged children, and to determine the extent to which performance on attention and executive tasks relates to social and biological variables as well as to ecologically meaningful outcomes, such as parent and teacher ratings of behavior and school problems. The 90 participants were selected from a longitudinal clinical trial of children with low to moderate levels of lead exposure. All participants had completed the attention/executive tasks from the NEPSY at age 5 and 7 years, and had been evaluated for behavior and learning problems by their parent and teacher with the BASC at age 7 years. As hypothesized, children’s performance significantly improved on all tasks between age 5 and 7 years, and the rate of change differed across the tasks. Correlation analyses examining the associations between social (i.e., IQ and SES) and biological variables (i.e., gender, age at study entry, pretreatment blood lead level, and treatment status) and changes in task performances were not significant. Results of multiple regression analyses supported the modest validity of the NEPSY tasks in predicting behavior and school problems. Specifically, only performance on Tower, an executive task of planning and self-monitoring, was inversely predictive of parent ratings of behavior problems at home, but not until age 7 years when perhaps these functions are more developed. Poor performance on tasks of sustained and selective auditory attentions both at 5 and 7 years, however, was most predictive of teacher perceptions of behavior and learning problems, which is likely related to increased demands to attend to novel verbal information in the classroom. The finding that these NEPSY tasks demonstrated different predictive relationships with the BASC outcomes suggests that they measure different subcomponents of attention and executive functions. Such results have implications for the use of performance measurements of attention in the early identification of antecedents to broader problem outcomes.Ph.D., Clinical Psychology -- Drexel University, 200