Assessing Planning Ability Across the Adult Life Span: Population Representative and Age Adjusted Reliability Estimates for the Tower of London (TOL F)
Planning ahead the consequences of future actions is a prototypical executive function. In clinical and experimental neuropsychology, disc transfer tasks like the Tower of London (TOL) are commonly used for the assessment of planning ability. Previous psychometric evaluations have, however, yielded a poor reliability of measuring planning performance with the TOL. Based on theory grounded task analyses and a systematic problem selection, the computerized TOL Freiburg version (TOL F) was developed to improve the task's psychometric properties for diagnostic applications. Here, we report reliability estimates for the TOL F from two large samples collected in Mainz, Germany (n 3,770; 40 80 years) and in Vienna, Austria (n 830; 16 84 years) Results show that planning accuracy on the TOL F possesses an adequate internal consistency and split half reliability >0.7) that are stable across the adult life span while the TOL F covers a broad range of graded difficulty even in healthy adults, making it suitable for both research and clinical application.
Archives of clinical neuropsychology the official journal of the National Academy of Neuropsychologists