ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Cognition
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1640417
cpCST: A New Continuous Performance Test for High-Precision Assessment of Attention Across the Lifespan
Provisionally accepted
Anna MacKay-Brandt1
Daniel Garcia-Barnett1Kai Xuan Gan1Olivia Ripley1Elaine Gazes2Michael Milham1,3
Stan Colcombe1,4,5*- 1Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, Orangeburg, United States
- 2Nathan S Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, Orangeburg, United States
- 3Child Mind Institute Inc, New York, United States
- 4New York University, New York, United States
- 5Columbia University, New York, United States
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Assessing sustained attention presents methodological challenges, particularly when spanning diverse populations whose baseline sensorimotor functioning may vary significantly. This study introduces the Continuous Performance Critical Stability Task (cpCST), a novel paradigm combining high-density sampling of behavior (30Hz), individualized calibration, and fixed-difficulty assessment to measure attentional control. In a sample of 166 adults (ages 18-76), we evaluated the psychometric properties of the cpCST's instantaneous reaction time (iRT) metric derived through dynamic time warping. Results demonstrated exceptional reliability (bootstrap split-half r = .999), and predictive validity for cognitive performance (flanker and Woodcock-Johnson) and cardiorespiratory fitness (est. VO2max). The cpCST achieved high temporal efficiency, with just two minutes of data correlating at r = .94 with full-task performance, outperforming a standard arrow-based flanker task. The cpCST's individualized calibration effectively isolated attentional control processes from baseline sensorimotor function, eliminating age-related slowing effects typically observed in reaction time tasks. This approach offers methodological advantages for lifespan studies, clinical populations, integration with neurophysiological measures, and computational modeling approaches while addressing limitations of existing attention assessment paradigms.
Keywords: sustained attention, sensorimotor integration, Reaction Time, Behavioral assessment, lifespan development, adaptive testing, Task reliability, individual differences
Received: 03 Jun 2025; Accepted: 22 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 MacKay-Brandt, Garcia-Barnett, Gan, Ripley, Gazes, Milham and Colcombe. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Stan Colcombe, Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, Orangeburg, United States
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