Letter Cancellation Performance Across the Adult Life Span

Abstract

Letter cancellation tasks are paper and pencil tests widely used in clinical and research settings as quick measures of attention/concentration, visual-spatial scanning abilities, and visual-spatial dysfunctions such as spatial neglect. Despite their popularity, only a few studies have investigated effects of age on letter cancellation performance and no comprehensive large-scale adult life-span norms are available for any of the letter cancellation tasks. We have developed a letter cancellation test, and we report a normative data obtained from a partially stratified sample of 351 healthy adults between 18 and 91 years of age. The results show the expected large age-related decline in the speed of letter cancellation performance and no age-related differences in spatial distribution of cancellation errors. We also provide various equations for precise predictions of Cancel H test performance. The results of correlational analyses show high reliability and provide evidence for both convergent and divergent validity of our letter cancellation task.