Benton visual form discrimination test in healthy children: normative data and qualitative analysis

Area of Science:

• Neuropsychological assessment
• Developmental psychology
• Cognitive neuroscience

Background:

• Attention evaluation is critical in neuropsychological assessments.
• Attentional functions are systemic and require diverse testing methods.
• The Benton Visual Form Discrimination Test (VFDT) is a tool for assessing visual attention.

Purpose of the Study:

• To provide clinicians with an effective tool for attention assessment.
• To establish normative data and performance analysis for the VFDT in an Italian sample of school children.
• To analyze age-related performance, quadrant effects, and sex differences on the VFDT.

Main Methods:

• A sample of 323 healthy Italian school children aged 5-11 participated.
• Performance on the Benton Visual Form Discrimination Test (VFDT) was analyzed.
• Data were analyzed for age, sex, test set division, and quadrant effects.

Main Results:

• VFDT performance significantly increased with age.
• Significant performance differences were observed when the test was divided into four sets.
• Younger children exhibited difficulties with sustained and maintenance attention.
• Correct answers were more frequent in top quadrants, especially in younger children.
• Sex did not significantly influence performance.
• Functional organization of the frontoparietal attention network appears to mature around 9-10 years.

Conclusions:

• The VFDT is a discriminative task for evaluating visual attention skills in children.
• The study provides valuable normative data for clinical practice in assessing complex visual attention and maintenance of attention over time.
• Findings suggest a developmental trajectory for the frontoparietal attentional network in children.