Abubakar A., Holding P., Van Baar A., Newton C.R.J.C., Van de Vijver F.J.R., Espy K.A.
Neuroassessment, Centre for Geographic Medicine Research, Box 230, Kilifi 80108, Kenya; Department of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Tilburg University, P.O. Box 90153, Tilburg 5000 LE, Netherlands; Child and Adolescent Studies, Utrecht University, P.O. Box 80125, Utrecht 3508 TC, Netherlands; International Centre for Behavioral Studies, P.O. Box 34307, Mombasa 80118, Kenya; Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Oxford OX3 7JX, United Kingdom; Department of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Tilburg University, P.O. Box 90153, Tilburg 5000 LE, Netherlands; Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, United States
Abubakar, A., Neuroassessment, Centre for Geographic Medicine Research, Box 230, Kilifi 80108, Kenya, Department of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Tilburg University, P.O. Box 90153, Tilburg 5000 LE, Netherlands, Child and Adolescent Studies, Utrecht University, P.O. Box 80125, Utrecht 3508 TC, Netherlands; Holding, P., Neuroassessment, Centre for Geographic Medicine Research, Box 230, Kilifi 80108, Kenya, International Centre for Behavioral Studies, P.O. Box 34307, Mombasa 80118, Kenya; Van Baar, A., Child and Adolescent Studies, Utrecht University, P.O. Box 80125, Utrecht 3508 TC, Netherlands; Newton, C.R.J.C., Neuroassessment, Centre for Geographic Medicine Research, Box 230, Kilifi 80108, Kenya, Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Oxford OX3 7JX, United Kingdom; Van de Vijver, F.J.R., Department of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Tilburg University, P.O. Box 90153, Tilburg 5000 LE, Netherlands; Espy, K.A., Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, United States
The aim of the study was to investigate early executive functioning in young children from 6-35 months of age. The study involved 319 randomly selected children from the community, 17 HIV exposed but uninfected children and 31 HIV infected ARV-naive children. A variation of the A-not-B task was used. While there were no group differences in total correct, perseverative errors, nor maximum error run, a significant percentage of children were unable to complete the task as a consequence of the children becoming overtly distressed or refusing to continue. In a multivariate analysis we observed that the significant predictors of non-completion were HIV exposure (both infected and exposed) and being under 24 months of age. These patterns of results indicate that future work with a broader array of tasks need to look at the association of HIV and EF tasks and potential contribution of factors such as emotion regulation, persistence and motivation on performance on EF tasks. © 2013 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.