The impact of visuomotor skills on two pen-and-paper tests of sustained attention (d2-R, FAIR)

We investigated the impact of motor skills on performance in two pen-and-paper tests of selective attention, the d2-R and the FAIR-2. Both tests require a visual search for target stimuli presented in a random order with distractor stimuli. In the d2-R, participants have to mark each target with a short stroke. In the FAIR-2, participants are required to draw a continuous line under each stimulus series that remains below the distractors, whereas targets are marked by drawing an upward spike into the target. The purpose of continuous marking in the FAIR-2 is to make the direction and order of participants' visual search apparent to the experimenter. We tested 120 participants with the d2-R, the FAIR-2, and five subtests (aiming, pegboard, steadiness, tapping, line-tracking) of the MLS, a test battery of fine motor skills. Our results revealed similarities and differences between the motor demands of the two tests. Performance on both tests correlated with tapping (hits) and line-tracking (time). In contrast, only FAIR-2 performance correlated with pegboard (time) and steadiness (errors). Regression analyses showed that MLS performance explained a significant amount of variance in FAIR-2 performance, but not in d2-R performance. When directly compared, the differences in explained variance were not significant, however. Hence, the results suggest that the sum of motor demands in the d2-R and the FAIR-2 are comparable, although there are some differences in specific motor requirements.