Validity and reliability of the Mobile Toolbox Faces and Names memory test.

Validation of the Mobile Toolbox Faces and Names associative memory test is presented. Ninety-two participants self-administered Faces and Names in-person; 956 self-administered Faces and Names remotely but took convergent measures in person; and 123 self-administered Faces and Names remotely twice, 14 days apart. Internal consistency (.76-.79) and test-retest reliability (ICC = .73) were acceptable. Convergent validity with WMS-IV Verbal Paired Associates was satisfactory (immediate .54; delayed .58). The findings suggest the remotely administered Faces and Names is a reliable instrument.

The NIH Infant and Toddler Toolbox: A new standardized tool for assessing neurodevelopment in children ages 1-42 months.

The progress of developmental research demands reliable measurement techniques, yet inconsistency persist across laboratories, subfields, and settings. To address this, the NIH Toolbox for Neurological and Behavioral Function (NIHTB)® has been extended to create a universal assessment for developmental and pediatric communities: The NIH Infant and Toddler ("Baby") Toolbox. Currently undergoing norming in a sample of 2550 children demographically representative of the 2020 U.S. census, the Baby Toolbox is slated for release in late 2024. This paper introduces the Baby Toolbox, details its objectives, development, and technological innovations, describes plans for reliability and norming, and invites researchers to consider the Baby Toolbox in the future studies. Ultimately, this initiative stands to enhance cross-study comparability and advance comprehensive developmental evaluation.

Mobile toolbox (MTB) remote measures of executive function and processing speed: development and validation.

OBJECTIVE: The ability to remotely monitor cognitive skills is increasing with the ubiquity of smartphones. The Mobile Toolbox (MTB) is a new measurement system that includes measures assessing Executive Functioning (EF) and Processing Speed (PS): Arrow Matching, Shape-Color Sorting, and Number-Symbol Match. The purpose of this study was to assess their psychometric properties. METHOD: MTB measures were developed for smartphone administration based on constructs measured in the NIH Toolbox® (NIHTB). Psychometric properties of the resulting measures were evaluated in three studies with participants ages 18 to 90. In Study 1 (N = 92), participants completed MTB measures in the lab and were administered both equivalent NIH TB measures and other external measures of similar cognitive constructs. In Study 2 (N = 1,021), participants completed the equivalent NIHTB measures in the lab and then took the MTB measures on their own, remotely. In Study 3 (N = 168), participants completed MTB measures twice remotely, two weeks apart. RESULTS: All three measures exhibited very high internal consistency and strong test-retest reliability, as well as moderately high correlations with comparable NIHTB tests and moderate correlations with external measures of similar constructs. Phone operating system (iOS vs. Android) had a significant impact on performance for Arrow Matching and Shape-Color Sorting, but no impact on either validity or reliability. CONCLUSIONS: Results support the reliability and convergent validity of MTB EF and PS measures for use across the adult lifespan in remote, self-administered designs.

Learners' Spontaneous Gesture Before a Math Lesson Predicts the Efficacy of Seeing Versus Doing Gesture During the Lesson.

Gestures-hand movements that accompany speech and express ideas-can help children learn how to solve problems, flexibly generalize learning to novel problem-solving contexts, and retain what they have learned. But does it matter who is doing the gesturing? We know that producing gesture leads to better comprehension of a message than watching someone else produce gesture. But we do not know how producing versus observing gesture impacts deeper learning outcomes such as generalization and retention across time. Moreover, not all children benefit equally from gesture instruction, suggesting that there are individual differences that may play a role in who learns from gesture. Here, we consider two factors that might impact whether gesture leads to learning, generalization, and retention after mathematical instruction: (1) whether children see gesture or do gesture and (2) whether a child spontaneously gestures before instruction when explaining their problem-solving reasoning. For children who spontaneously gestured before instruction, both doing and seeing gesture led to better generalization and retention of the knowledge gained than a comparison manipulative action. For children who did not spontaneously gesture before instruction, doing gesture was less effective than the comparison action for learning, generalization, and retention. Importantly, this learning deficit was specific to gesture, as these children did benefit from doing the comparison manipulative action. Our findings are the first evidence that a child's use of a particular representational format for communication (gesture) directly predicts that child's propensity to learn from using the same representational format.

The effects of gesture and action training on the retention of math equivalence.

Introduction: Hand gestures and actions-with-objects (hereafter 'actions') are both forms of movement that can promote learning. However, the two have unique affordances, which means that they have the potential to promote learning in different ways. Here we compare how children learn, and importantly retain, information after performing gestures, actions, or a combination of the two during instruction about mathematical equivalence. We also ask whether individual differences in children's understanding of mathematical equivalence (as assessed by spontaneous gesture before instruction) impacts the effects of gesture- and action-based instruction. Method: Across two studies, racially and ethnically diverse third and fourth-grade students (N=142) were given instruction about how to solve mathematical equivalence problems (eg., 2+9+4=__+4) as part of a pretest-training-posttest design. In Study 1, instruction involved teaching students to produce either actions or gestures. In Study 2, instruction involved teaching students to produce either actions followed by gestures or gestures followed by actions. Across both studies, speech and gesture produced during pretest explanations were coded and analyzed to measure individual differences in pretest understanding. Children completed written posttests immediately after instruction, as well as the following day, and four weeks later, to assess learning, generalization and retention. Results: In Study 1 we find that, regardless of individual differences in pre-test understanding of mathematical equivalence, children learn from both action and gesture, but gesture-based instruction promotes retention better than action-based instruction. In Study 2 we find an influence of individual differences: children who produced relatively few types of problem-solving strategies (as assessed by their pre-test gestures and speech) perform better when they receive action training before gesture training than when they receive gesture training first. In contrast, children who expressed many types of strategies, and thus had a more complex understanding of mathematical equivalence prior to instruction, performed equally with both orders. Discussion: These results demonstrate that action training, followed by gesture, can be a useful stepping-stone in the initial stages of learning mathematical equivalence, and that gesture training can help learners retain what they learn.

Development and validation of an episodic memory measure in the Mobile Toolbox (MTB): Arranging Pictures.

INTRODUCTION: Arranging Pictures is a new episodic memory test based on the NIH Toolbox (NIHTB) Picture Sequence Memory measure and optimized for self-administration on a personal smartphone within the Mobile Toolbox (MTB). We describe evidence from three distinct validation studies. METHOD: In Study 1, 92 participants self-administered Arranging Pictures on study-provided smartphones in the lab and were administered external measures of similar and dissimilar constructs by trained examiners to assess validity under controlled circumstances. In Study 2, 1,021 participants completed the external measures in the lab and self-administered Arranging Pictures remotely on their personal smartphones to assess validity in real-world contexts. In Study 3, 141 participants self-administered Arranging Pictures remotely twice with a two-week delay on personal iOS smartphones to assess test-retest reliability and practice effects. RESULTS: Internal consistency was good across samples (ρxx = .80 to .85, p < .001). Test-retest reliability was marginal (ICC = .49, p < .001) and there were significant practice effects after a two-week delay (ΔM = 3.21 (95% CI [2.56, 3.88]). As expected, correlations with convergent measures were significant and moderate to large in magnitude (ρ = .44 to .76, p < .001), while correlations with discriminant measures were small (ρ = .23 to .27, p < .05) or nonsignificant. Scores demonstrated significant negative correlations with age (ρ = -.32 to -.21, p < .001). Mean performance was slightly higher in the iOS compared to the Android group (MiOS = 18.80, NiOS = 635; MAndroid = 17.11, NAndroid = 386; t(757.73) = 4.17, p < .001), but device type did not significantly influence the psychometric properties of the measure. Indicators of potential cheating were mixed; average scores were significantly higher in the remote samples (F(2, 850) = 11.415, p < .001), but there were not significantly more perfect scores. CONCLUSION: The MTB Arranging Pictures measure demonstrated evidence of reliability and validity when self-administered on personal device. Future research should examine the potential for cheating in remote settings and the properties of the measure in clinical samples.

Development and Validation of a Vocabulary Measure in the Mobile Toolbox.

OBJECTIVE: We describe the development of a new computer adaptive vocabulary test, Mobile Toolbox (MTB) Word Meaning, and validity evidence from 3 studies. METHOD: Word Meaning was designed to be a multiple-choice synonym test optimized for self-administration on a personal smartphone. The items were first calibrated online in a sample of 7,525 participants to create the computer-adaptive test algorithm for the Word Meaning measure within the MTB app. In Study 1, 92 participants self-administered Word Meaning on study-provided smartphones in the lab and were administered external measures by trained examiners. In Study 2, 1,021 participants completed the external measures in the lab and Word Meaning was self-administered remotely on their personal smartphones. In Study 3, 141 participants self-administered Word Meaning remotely twice with a 2-week delay on personal iPhones. RESULTS: The final bank included 1363 items. Internal consistency was adequate to good across samples (ρxx = 0.78 to 0.81, p < .001). Test-retest reliability was good (ICC = 0.65, p < .001), and the mean theta score was not significantly different upon the second administration. Correlations were moderate to large with measures of similar constructs (ρ = 0.67-0.75, p < .001) and non-significant with measures of dissimilar constructs. Scores demonstrated small to moderate correlations with age (ρ = 0.35 to 0.45, p < .001) and education (ρ = 0.26, p < .001). CONCLUSION: The MTB Word Meaning measure demonstrated evidence of reliability and validity in three samples. Further validation studies in clinical samples are necessary.

Exploring Individual Differences: A Case for Measuring Children's Spontaneous Gesture Production as a Predictor of Learning From Gesture Instruction.

Decades of research have established that learners benefit when instruction includes hand gestures. This benefit is seen when learners watch an instructor gesture, as well as when they are taught or encouraged to gesture themselves. However, there is substantial individual variability with respect to this phenomenon-not all individuals benefit equally from gesture instruction. In the current paper, we explore the sources of this variability. First, we review the existing research on individual differences that do or do not predict learning from gesture instruction, including differences that are either context-dependent (linked to the particular task at hand) or context-independent (linked to the learner across multiple tasks). Next, we focus on one understudied measure of individual difference: the learner's own spontaneous gesture rate. We present data showing rates of "non-gesturers" across a number of studies and we provide theoretical motivation for why this is a fruitful area for future research. We end by suggesting ways in which research on individual differences will help gesture researchers to further refine existing theories and develop specific predictions about targeted gesture intervention for all kinds of learners.

Using the Mobile Toolbox in child and adolescent samples: A feasibility study.

Cognitive research with developmental samples requires improved methods that support large-scale, diverse, and open science. This paper offers initial evidence to support the Mobile Toolbox (MTB), a self-administered remote smartphone-based cognitive battery, in youth populations, from a pilot sample of 99 children (Mage = 11.79 years; 36% female; 53% White, 33% Black or African American, 9% Asian, and 15% Hispanic). Completion rates (95%-99%), practice performance (96%-100%), internal consistency (0.60-0.98), and correlations with similar NIHTB measures (0.55-0.77) provide the first evidence to support the MTB in a youth sample, although there were some inconsistencies across measures. Preliminary findings provide promising evidence of the MTB in developmental populations, and further studies are encouraged.

Language systematizes attention: How relational language enhances relational representation by guiding attention.

Language can affect cognition, but through what mechanism? Substantial past research has focused on how labeling can elicit categorical representation during online processing. We focus here on a particularly powerful type of language-relational language-and show that relational language can enhance relational representation in children through an embodied attention mechanism. Four-year-old children were given a color-location conjunction task, in which they were asked to encode a two-color square, split either vertically or horizontally (e.g., red on the left, blue on the right), and later recall the same configuration from its mirror reflection. During the encoding phase, children in the experimental condition heard relational language (e.g., "Red is on the left of blue"), while those in the control condition heard generic non-relational language (e.g., "Look at this one, look at it closely"). At recall, children in the experimental condition were more successful at choosing the correct relational representation between the two colors compared to the control group. Moreover, they exhibited different attention patterns as predicted by the attention shift account of relational representation (Franconeri et al., 2012). To test the sustained effect of language and the role of attention, during the second half of the study, the experimental condition was given generic non-relational language. There was a sustained advantage in the experimental condition for both behavioral accuracies and signature attention patterns. Overall, our findings suggest that relational language enhances relational representation by guiding learners' attention, and this facilitative effect persists over time even in the absence of language. Implications for the mechanism of how relational language can enhance the learning of relational systems (e.g., mathematics, spatial cognition) by guiding attention will be discussed.

The Paradox in Positive and Negative Aspects of Emotional Functioning Among Older Adults with Early Stages of Cognitive Impairment.

Introduction: Emotional functioning in older adults is influenced by normal aging and cognitive impairment, likely heterogeneous across positive versus negative aspects of emotional functioning. Little is known about positive emotional experiences at the early stages of cognitive impairment. Methods: We assessed different aspects of emotional functioning among 448 participants aged 65+ (Normal Control (NC) = 276, Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) = 103, and mild dementia of the Alzheimer type (mild DAT) = 69) and tested moderators. Results: Compared to NC, older adults with MCI and mild DAT have maintained many positive aspects of emotional functioning, despite higher levels of negative affect, sadness, and loneliness. Among the oldest-old, the mild DAT group experienced higher fear and lower self-efficacy. Discussion: Older adults at early stages of cognitive impairment can experience positive aspects of emotional functioning, such as positive affect, purpose, and life satisfaction, all of which are important buildable psychological resources for coping.

Longer looks for language: Novel labels lengthen fixation duration for 2-year-old children.

The language infants hear guides their visual attention; infants look more to objects when they are labeled. However, it is unclear whether labels also change the way infants attend to and encode those objects-that is, whether hearing an object label changes infants' online visual processing of that object. Here, we examined this question in the context of novel word learning, asking whether nuanced measures of visual attention, specifically fixation durations, change when 2-year-olds hear a label for a novel object (e.g., "Look at the dax") compared with when they hear a non-labeling phrase (e.g., "Look at that"). Results confirmed that children visually process objects differently when they are labeled, using longer fixations to examine labeled objects versus unlabeled objects. Children also showed robust retention of these labels on a subsequent test trial, suggesting that these longer fixations accompanied successful word learning. Moreover, when children were presented with the same objects again in a silent re-exposure phase, children's fixations were again longer when looking at the previously labeled objects. Finally, fixation duration at first exposure and silent re-exposure were correlated, indicating a persistent effect of language on visual processing. These effects of hearing labels on visual attention point to the critical interactions involved in cross-modal learning and emphasize the benefits of looking beyond aggregate measures of attention to identify cognitive learning mechanisms during infancy.

Baseline characterization of the ARMADA (Assessing Reliable Measurement in Alzheimer's Disease) study cohorts.

INTRODUCTION: The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Toolbox (NIHTB) provides computerized measures of cognition, emotion, sensation, and motor abilities across the lifespan. The ARMADA (Assessing Reliable Measurement in Alzheimer's Disease and Cognitive Aging) study validated the NIHTB in individuals across the cognitive aging spectrum. This article reports the characteristics of our sample of participants. METHODS: Participants were recruited across nine sites and classified clinically as cognitively normal (NC), with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), or with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT.) They completed the NIHTB at multiple time points and many had at least one Alzheimer's biomarker previously obtained. RESULTS: Groups differed with respect to dementia severity levels, as anticipated, but were well-matched across many demographic characteristics. DISCUSSION: The ARMADA study demographics and baseline characteristics provide a suitable sample for validating the NIHTB across the cognitive aging spectrum. Other enriched samples (African American participants, Spanish NIHTB, 85+ years of age) will be reported elsewhere. HIGHLIGHTS: There is a need for assessments that can detect the early stages of cognitive decline in older adults. The ARMADA (Assessing Reliable Measurement in Alzheimer's Disease and Cognitive Aging) study will validate the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Toolbox across the aging spectrum, including mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT). Here we report the characteristics of participants. Groups were well-matched across most demographic characteristics, and clinical characteristics differed as expected. ARMADA study cohorts reflect their respective clinical syndromes for validating the NIH Toolbox.

I See What You Are Saying: Hearing Infants' Visual Attention and Social Engagement in Response to Spoken and Sign Language.

Infants are endowed with a proclivity to acquire language, whether it is presented in the auditory or visual modality. Moreover, in the first months of life, listening to language supports fundamental cognitive capacities, including infants' facility to form object categories (e.g., dogs and bottles). Recently, we have found that for English-acquiring infants as young as 4 months of age, this precocious interface between language and cognition is sufficiently broad to include not only their native spoken language (English), but also sign language (American Sign Language, ASL). In the current study, we take this work one step further, asking how "sign-naïve" infants-hearing infants with no prior exposure to sign language-deploy their attentional and social strategies in the context of episodes involving either spoken or sign language. We adopted a now-standard categorization task, presenting 4- to 6-month-old infants with a series of exemplars from a single category (e.g., dinosaurs). Each exemplar was introduced by a woman who appeared on the screen together with the object. What varied across conditions was whether this woman introduced the exemplar by speaking (English) or signing (ASL). We coded infants' visual attentional strategies and their spontaneous vocalizations during this task. Infants' division of attention and visual switches between the woman and exemplar varied as a function of language modality. In contrast, infants' spontaneous vocalizations revealed similar patterns across languages. These results, which advance our understanding of how infants allocate attentional resources and engage with communicative partners across distinct modalities, have implications for specifying our theories of language acquisition.

Hands on: Nonverbal communication in Native and non-Native American parent-child dyads during informal learning.

Parent-child communication is a rich, multimodal process. Substantial research has documented the communicative strategies in certain (predominantly White) United States families, yet we know little about these communicative strategies in Native American families. The current study addresses that gap by documenting the verbal and nonverbal behaviors used by parents and their 4-year-old children (N = 39, 25 boys) across two communities: Menominee families (low to middle income) living on tribal lands in rural Wisconsin, and non-Native, primarily White families (middle income) living in an urban area. Dyads participated in a free-play forest-diorama task designed to elicit talk and play about the natural world. Children from both communities incorporated actions and gestures freely in their talk, emphasizing the importance of considering nonverbal behaviors when evaluating what children know. In sharp contrast to the stereotype that Native American children talk very little, Menominee children talked more than their non-Native counterparts, underlining the importance of taking into account cultural context in child assessments. For children and parents across both communities, gestures were more likely than actions to be related to the content of speech and were more likely than actions to be produced simultaneously with speech. This tight coupling between speech and gesture replicates and extends prior research with predominantly White (and adult) samples. These findings not only broaden our theories of communicative interaction and development, but also provide new evidence about the role of nonverbal behaviors in informal learning contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Sign language, like spoken language, promotes object categorization in young hearing infants.

The link between language and cognition is unique to our species and emerges early in infancy. Here, we provide the first evidence that this precocious language-cognition link is not limited to spoken language, but is instead sufficiently broad to include sign language, a language presented in the visual modality. Four- to six-month-old hearing infants, never before exposed to sign language, were familiarized to a series of category exemplars, each presented by a woman who either signed in American Sign Language (ASL) while pointing and gazing toward the objects, or pointed and gazed without language (control). At test, infants viewed two images: one, a new member of the now-familiar category; and the other, a member of an entirely new category. Four-month-old infants who observed ASL distinguished between the two test objects, indicating that they had successfully formed the object category; they were as successful as age-mates who listened to their native (spoken) language. Moreover, it was specifically the linguistic elements of sign language that drove this facilitative effect: infants in the control condition, who observed the woman only pointing and gazing failed to form object categories. Finally, the cognitive advantages of observing ASL quickly narrow in hearing infants: by 5- to 6-months, watching ASL no longer supports categorization, although listening to their native spoken language continues to do so. Together, these findings illuminate the breadth of infants' early link between language and cognition and offer insight into how it unfolds.

Individual differences in gesture interpretation predict children's propensity to pick a gesturer as a good informant.

To learn from others, children rely on cues (e.g., familiarity, confidence) to infer who around them will provide useful information. We extended this research to ask whether children will use an informant's inclination to gesture as a marker of whether or not the informant is a good person to learn from. Children (N = 459, ages 4-12 years) watched short videos in which actresses made statements accompanied by meaningful iconic gestures, beat gestures (which act as prosodic markers with speech), or no gestures. After each trial, children were asked "Who do you think would be a good teacher?" (good teacher [experimental] condition) or "Who do you think would be a good friend?" (good friend [control] condition). Results show that children do believe that someone who produces iconic gesture would make a good teacher compared with someone who does not, but this is only later in childhood and only if children have the propensity to see gesture as meaningful. The same effects were not found in the good friend condition, indicating that children's responses are not just about liking an adult who gestures more. These findings have implications for how children attend to and learn from instructional gesture.

Becoming human: human infants link language and cognition, but what about the other great apes?

Human language has no parallel elsewhere in the animal kingdom. It is unique not only for its structural complexity but also for its inextricable interface with core cognitive capacities such as object representation, object categorization and abstract rule learning. Here, we (i) review recent evidence documenting how (and how early) language interacts with these core cognitive capacities in the mind of the human infant, and (ii) consider whether this link exists in non-human great apes-our closest genealogical cousins. Research with human infants demonstrates that well before they begin to speak, infants have already forged a link between language and core cognitive capacities. Evident by just three months of age, this language-cognition link unfolds in a rich developmental cascade, with each advance providing the foundation for subsequent, more precise and more powerful links. This link supports our species' capacity to represent and convey abstract concepts and to communicate beyond the immediate here and now. By contrast, although the communication systems of great apes are sophisticated in their own right, there is no conclusive evidence that apes establish reference, convey information declaratively or pass down communicative devices via cultural transmission. Thus, the evidence currently available reinforces the uniqueness of human language and the power of its interface to cognition. This article is part of the theme issue 'What can animal communication teach us about human language?'

Learning math by hand: The neural effects of gesture-based instruction in 8-year-old children.

Producing gesture can be a powerful tool for facilitating learning. This effect has been replicated across a variety of academic domains, including algebra, chemistry, geometry, and word learning. Yet the mechanisms underlying the effect are poorly understood. Here we address this gap using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We examine the neural correlates underlying how children solve mathematical equivalence problems learned with the help of either a speech + gesture strategy, or a speech-alone strategy. Children who learned through a speech + gesture were more likely to recruit motor regions when subsequently solving problems during a scan than children who learned through speech alone. This suggests that gesture promotes learning, at least in part, because it is a type of action. In an exploratory analysis, we also found that children who learned through speech + gesture showed subthreshold activation in regions outside the typical action-learning network, corroborating behavioral findings suggesting that the mechanisms supporting learning through gesture and action are not identical. This study is one of the first to explore the neural mechanisms of learning through gesture.

Actions speak louder than gestures when you are 2 years old.

Interpreting iconic gestures can be challenging for children. Here, we explore the features and functions of iconic gestures that make them more challenging for young children to interpret than instrumental actions. In Study 1, we show that 2.5-year-olds are able to glean size information from handshape in a simple gesture, although their performance is significantly worse than 4-year-olds'. Studies 2 to 4 explore the boundary conditions of 2.5-year-olds' gesture understanding. In Study 2, 2.5-year-old children have an easier time interpreting size information in hands that reach than in hands that gesture. In Study 3, we tease apart the perceptual features and functional objectives of reaches and gestures. We created a context in which an action has the perceptual features of a reach (extending the hand toward an object) but serves the function of a gesture (the object is behind a barrier and not obtainable; the hand thus functions to represent, rather than reach for, the object). In this context, children struggle to interpret size information in the hand, suggesting that gesture's representational function (rather than its perceptual features) is what makes it hard for young children to interpret. A distance control (Study 4) in which a person holds a box in gesture space (close to the body) demonstrates that children's difficulty interpreting static gesture cannot be attributed to the physical distance between a gesture and its referent. Together, these studies provide evidence that children's struggle to interpret iconic gesture may stem from its status as representational action. (PsycINFO Database Record