Neuropsychological assessments in the BrainCheck Sport Battery
Assessment
Description
Measurement
Flanker
We presented participants with a target arrow pointing to the left or right. The target was surrounded by congruent (> > > > >), or incongruent (<< > <<) arrows. Participants identified the direction of the target as quickly and accurately as possible.
Reaction time
Digit Symbol Substitution
Participants must match an arbitrary correspondence of symbols to digits; when presented with a new symbol, they input as quickly as possible the corresponding digit.
Cognitive processing
Stroop
Participants are instructed to find a word matching the given name of a color. There are two types of trials: CONGRUENT in which the word name and font color are the same (e.g., the word RED presented in red font), and INCONGRUENT in which the word name indicates a different color than the font (e.g., the word RED presented in green font).
Cognitive executive function
Trail Making
Participants are instructed to connect a set of 25 dots in their correct order as rapidly as possible. Trail Making Test A uses only numbers (1 through 25), while Trail Making Test B employs alternating letters and numbers (1 – A – 2 – B – 3 – C –…).
Visual attention and cognitive flexibility
Coordination
A ball is displayed on the tablet, moving according to the tilt of the tablet. A participant holds the tablet out in front at arm’s length and tilts it appropriately to keep the ball in a central circle.
Coordination ability
Immediate and Delayed Recognition
First, immediate recognition is measured by serially displaying 10 words, and then asking whether a word was just seen—either a distractor word or a target word (20 trials). At the end of the testing battery, without seeing the original list again, participants are again presented with 20 words and asked whether each word was presented before.
Memory
Declarations
Author contributions
DME and YK contributed conception and design of the study; Data acquisition was performed by BF; SY and BH performed the statistical analysis, under the supervision of RHG. SY, BK and HQP wrote the first draft of manuscript, which was revised and approved by BH and RHG. SY, BK, HQP, KS and BH revised the manuscript for submission. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
Conflicts of interest
The following authors declare the following competing interests: SY, BF, YK, BH, KS, RHG reports personal fees from BrainCheck, outside the submitted work; DME, BF, YK, BH, RHG reports receiving stock options from BrainCheck.
Ethical approval
This study protocol was reviewed and approved by the Baylor College of Medicine IRB.
Consent to participate
Voluntary written informed consent to participate in the study was obtained from all participants.
Consent to publication
Not applicable.
Availability of data and materials
Data may be made available by contacting the corresponding author and with a data use agreement.
Funding
BrainCheck, Inc, provided support in the form of salaries for authors SY, BF, YK, BH, KS, RHG but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript, and only provided financial support in the form of some of the authors’ salaries and research materials (the software battery of tests).
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