Corsi Block-Tapping Task Analysis

Corsi block-tapping task. The Corsi block-tapping task evaluates spatial working memory. Participants were asked to repeat the pointing pattern of the examiner to a series of blocks, that were arranged in an irregular order on a board based on the original standard display developed by Corsi (1972). First participants were asked to repeat the exact same tapping pattern as the examiner (forwards). In the second part of this task participants were asked to reverse the pattern given by the examiner (backwards). Each block contained two sequences consisting of the same amount of numbers, and difficulty was increased by asking the participants to repeat increasingly longer block patterns. This process continued until the participant misses both
The Digit Span is a subtest of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Adults–Fourth Edition (Wechsler, 2008). The total digit score, which is a composite of the child’s forward and backward spans, is a measure of working memory. The forward digit span task is a commonly used measure of immediate verbal short-term memory, whereas the backward digit span task is often used as a measure of executive attention (Ramirez et al., 2012). During these tasks participants were instructed to verbally repeat a series of digits that were read out loud by the examiner at a rate of one digit per second. In the forward digit span task, the participant was asked to immediately repeat the series of digits back to the examiner in the same order as they were presented. If the participant repeated both trials of the same block successfully, he/she moved on to two more trials of a block that is one digit longer. This process continued until the participant misses both trials of a particular length or they reached the maximum 8-item block size. In the backward digit span task the participant was asked to repeat a series of digits in the reverse order from the presented order. As for forward span, this process continued until the participant misses a particular length. Since the backward digit span task is a more challenging variation of the forward span task, the items go up to a maximum length of seven digits. The combination of correct trials on the forward and backward digit span
The Virtual Tübingen Task (VTT) is a virtual reality environment of the town Tübingen in Germany which assesses navigation skills, designed by Van der Ham et al. (2010). The task consisted of several elements: the study phase, a scene recognition test, a route continuation test, a route ordering test and a map selection test. The participant was shown a short movie (302 seconds) of a route through the virtual environment, whereby the set speed equals walking speed. Afterwards, different aspects of knowledge about the learned route was systematically assessed by means of four tasks. The first test was the scene recognition test. This test showed 21 snapshots, of which 11 were snapshots from the movie and the other 10 were distractors which were not shown in the movie. The participant had to reply whether he/she saw the picture in the movie or not. The total score was the percentage of correctly answered responses. The second administered test was route continuation. In this test the participant was shown an image of the route, after which they were asked whether the route was continued with a left turn, straight ahead or a right turn. In total 11 images were shown. The tests until now were performed on the computer, but the following were not. The next administered test was map selection. Four closely resembling maps were shown to the participants which were supposed to represent the route that they saw in the short movie shown in the beginning.