Each
year, the British Psychological Society gives ten awards to researchers to allow them to provide an undergraduate with 'hands-on'
experience of research during the summer vacation, to gain an insight into
scientific research and to encourage them to consider an academic career. The
scheme is a prestigious award that marks out a student as a future researcher
and potential academic. It is hoped that the senior researcher, to whom the
award is made, will develop the student's potential and interest in research.
We are
very pleased therefore that this year, one of these awards has been given to
Ashok Jansari to employ Victoria Jefferies, who has just completed her 2nd
year, to work on a project with him exploring cognitive deficits in children
with atypical development. Of all cognitive functions, the most elusive to
understand and assess have been the 'higher level' processes that facilitate
and optimise an individual’s approach to unfamiliar situations; over time these
have become known as executive functions (EFs). While assessments such as the
Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) have been used to assess the integrity of
the EFs, research has shown that many of these tests can prove very insensitive
(e.g. Shallice & Burgess, 1991) which highlighted the need for the
development of more 'ecologically-valid' assessments. Jansari et al (2004) used
non-immersive virtual reality to develop a 'multiple-errands task' known as JEF©
(the Jansari assessment of Executive Functions) to address this need. JEF©
yields eight different measures: planning, prioritisation, selection,
creative-thinking, adaptive-thinking, action-based prospective memory (PM),
event-based PM and time-based PM. Using JEF©, Jansari et al (2004) were able to
differentiate patients who had performed in the 'non-impaired' range on
standard clinical assessments, from matched healthy controls. Subsequently the
assessment has been used to look in healthy controls at the impact on EFs of
ecstasy, alcohol, cannabis and nicotine (Jansari et al, 2013, Montgomery,
Jansari and colleagues, 2010, 1011, 2012).
Given
that the frontal parts of the brain are the last to develop in humans and the
lack of reliable objective measures of EFs in children, recently, a new
assessment, specifically for use with younger individuals known as JEF-C© has
been developed. As always, this involved quite a number of people working with
Ashok including Caroline Edmonds, Tony Leadbetter, an Erasmus student Nadine
Wanke and a number of MSc students
Rebecca Gordon, Alex Devlin, Meryl Hughes, Harriet Fisher and Mandy
Cracknell (Jansari et al, 2012). JEF-C© is able to show the developmental
progression of EFs through childhood and adolescence that mirrors the
subjective ratings given by parents or teachers on the BRIEF that is used by
clinicians and educational psychologists (GIoia et al, 2000). Since a number of
disorders of atypical development such as Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are thought to involve
executive impairments, the aim of the study that Ashok and Victoria will
conduct is to use JEF-C© to investigate EFs in these groups.
The main
aims of the project are:
• To evaluate the suitability of JEF-C©
in children with ADHD and ASD.
• To compare the performance of children
with these developmental disorders to that of typically developing children to
identify the specific loci of difficulties as well as islets of normal
performance. This information will greatly help educational psychologists
working with such children.
• To use the data in conjunction with
cognitive theories of the two disorders to suggest possible avenues for future
research to develop therapeutic interventions for the specific areas of
difficulty.
The
benefits that Victoria will hopefully get are:
• Learning to administer
neuropsychological assessments.
• Working with children with atypical
development in a research context.
• Being trained on data analysis.
• Learning how to interpret findings
relative to original predictions and extant literature.
It is
hoped that through this studentship, Victoria will consider staying in research
hopefully to do a PhD - at UEL if there is funding..... :-)
Ash Jansari
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