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Educational and Psychological Measurement
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Measuring Attentional Ability in Older Adults

Development and Psychometric Evaluation of DriverScan

Lesa Hoffman

The Pennsylvania State University

Xiangdong Yang

The University of Kansas

James A. Bovaird

University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Susan E. Embretson

Georgia Institute of Technology

Although deficits in visual attention are often postulated as an important component of many declines in cognitive processing and functional outcomes in older adults, surprisingly little emphasis has been placed on evaluating psychometric instruments with which individual differences in visual attention ability can be assessed. This article reports the development and beginning psychometric evaluation of DriverScan, a change detection measure of attentional search for older adults. A constrained graded response model is used to approximate response speed and accuracy with categories of immediate, delayed, or no response. DriverScan items are shown to have excellent reliability over the studied sample, and the distribution of items is shown to adequately cover the difficulty continuum and to be maximally sensitive at distinguishing individuals with lower than average abilities (i.e., individuals with attention deficits). Item design features representing goaldirected and stimulus-driven attentional processing significantly predict item difficulty as hypothesized.

Key Words: visual attention • aging • item response theory • change detection

Educational and Psychological Measurement, Vol. 66, No. 6, 984-1000 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0013164406288170
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