Figure 1.
Correlation between age (yrs.) and cognitive speed as assessed by the KITAP (z-scores) [18], [33].
A linear trend indicated a reduction in cognitive speed with increasing age, a quadratic trend indicated a sudden decrease in cognitive speed at the age of 10 years, and a cubic trend was indicative of a stepwise decrease in cognitive speed (decrease – plateau – decrease) for the age range of 6 to 10 years.
Figure 2.
Correlation between age (yrs.) and distractibility as assessed by the KITAP [18], [33].
A linear trend was indicative of a reduction in distractibility with increasing age. There was no quadratic trend, and a cubic trend was indicative of a plateau (decrease – plateau) for ages greater than 10 years.
Figure 3.
Correlation between age (yrs.) and lapses of attention as assessed by the KITAP [18], [33].
A linear trend was indicative of a reduction of lapses of attention with increasing age; a quadratic trend, but no cubic trend, was indicative of a plateau (decrease – plateau) starting at the age of 8 years.
Figure 4.
Correlation between scholastic achievement (school grades in German) and the z-scores of lapses of attention as assessed by the KITAP [18], [33].
A linear trend was indicative of an increase in lapses of attention with a decline in school grades (1 = “very good”; 6 = “worst”), and a quadratic and cubic trend was indicative of a plateau starting between the school grades 1 and 2.
Table 1.
Characteristics of the study sample (n = 61) as indexed by age (yrs., mean +/− standard deviation [SD]).
Table 2.
Sex and age distribution of the study sample (n = 61) as indexed by age groups (yrs., mean +/− standard deviation [SD], range).
Table 3.
Parameters of attentional performance in the KITAP [19], [34] as indexed by the median (MD) of reaction time (RT), standard deviation (SD) of RT, error performance (ER) and omissions (OM).
Table 4.
Thresholds for exclusion of outliers for the median (MD) of reaction time (RT) in milliseconds (ms), with standard deviations (SD) for different subtests of the KITAP [19], [34].