ABSTRACT

The behavioural outcomes associated with atypical cerebral lateralization during the early stages of cognitive development is an interesting research venture. However, there are few tasks for assessing lateralization in young children. The current study describes the Magic Hat task and the Teddy Bear Picnic task, which were designed to measure the lateralization of language and visuospatial attention, respectively, in children as young as three years old. Forty-five adults were recruited to complete the child-friendly tasks as well as the Word Generation and Landmark tasks whilst functional Transcranial Doppler ultrasound (fTCD) measured cerebral blood flow velocity. As expected, at the group level, the Magic Hat task produced left hemisphere lateralization, and the Teddy Bear Picnic task produced right hemisphere lateralization. Both tasks demonstrated high internal reliability (α > .80). The laterality indices produced by the Magic Hat task correlated with the Word Generation task, ρ = .52, p = .001. Likewise, the laterality indices produced by the Teddy Bear Picnic task correlated with the Landmark task, ρ = .45, p = .028. Thus, the Magic Hat and Teddy Bear Picnic tasks are reliable and valid measures of language and visuospatial lateralization, suitable for toddlers and young children using fTCD.

摘要

在认知发展的早期阶段与非典型脑侧化相关的行为结果是一项有趣的研究。然而，评估幼儿侧化的任务很少。目前的研究描述了魔术帽任务和泰迪熊野餐任务，它们旨在分别测量年仅三岁儿童的语言和视觉空间注意力的偏侧化。招募了 45 名成年人来完成对儿童友好的任务以及单词生成和地标任务，同时功能性经颅多普勒超声 (fTCD) 测量脑血流速度。正如预期的那样，在小组层面，魔术帽任务产生左半球侧向化，泰迪熊野餐任务产生右半球侧向化。这两项任务都表现出很高的内部可靠性（α > .80）。Magic Hat 任务产生的偏侧指数与 Word Generation 任务相关，ρ = .52，p  = .001。同样，泰迪熊野餐任务产生的偏侧指数与地标任务相关，ρ = .45，p  = .028。因此，Magic Hat 和 Teddy Bear Picnic 任务是语言和视觉空间偏侧化的可靠和有效的测量方法，适用于使用 fTCD 的幼儿和幼儿。