USE OF THE TACTUAL PERFORMANCE-TEST FOR COGNITIVE-ABILITY TESTING WITH AFRICAN CHILDREN

Researchers evaluated 195 rural Zairian children between 5 and 12 years of age with the Tactual Performance Test (TPT) used in the Reitan-Indiana Battery. For all of the TPT performance and memory measures, Zairian children with poorer anthropometric indicators of nutritional well-being were significantly below the age-matched groups of American and Canadian children. The Zairian children also did not demonstrate the typical improvements between the dominant and nondominant hand trials. Older Zairian children with such decrements tended to do more poorly on the Simultaneous Processing and Nonverbal ability portions of the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children. Although probably not appropriate for direct intercultural comparisons, the authors concluded that neuropsychological measures derived from tasks such as the TPT may still be useful in monitoring the longitudinal brain-behavior impact of various health interventions for enhancing intellectual development for African children.