Emotional Continous Performance Task: Assesing attention and executive control

Tested on MEDUSA© Platform v2024

The Emotional Continuous Performance Task (ECPT) app is an standardize evaluation tool designed to assess and measure an individual's attentional abilities and, to a lesser extent, their response inhibition or disinhibition as part of executive control. This app provides a convenient and efficient means of administering the test in various settings, such as research studies, clinical assessments, and educational environments.

The ECPT task involves three different stimuli: angry faces, happy faces and neutral faces with an artificial sound. Each trial consists of two stimuli according to the follwing pairs: angry-angry, angry-happy, happy-happy, and happy-neutral.

There are four main scores that are used to assess the subject's performance:

• Correct Detection: This indicates the number of times the subejct responded to the target stimulus. Higher rates of correct detections indicate better attentional capacity.
• Reaction times: This measures the amount of time between the presentation of the stimulus and the user's response.
• Omission errors: This indicates the number of times the target was presented, but the client did not respond/click the mouse. High omission rates indicate that the subject is either not paying attention (distractibility) to stimuli or has a sluggish response.
• Commission errors: This score indicates the number of times the client responded but no target was presented. A fast reaction time and high commission error rate points to difficulties with impulsivity. A slow reaction time with high commission and omission errors, indicates inattention in general.

The data files contain the necessary information to calculate these metrics. Normally, the subject's scores are compared with the normative scores for the age, group and gender of the person being tested.

References

[1] Silvana, M. S., & Nada, P. J. (2009). Comparison of visual and emotional continuous performance test related to sequence of presentation, gender and age. Contributions, Section of Biological and Medical Sciences, 1, 167-178.