Screening Executive Functions of Preschool Children via a Web Application

The present research protocol describes the tasks of a web application that was constructed in order to assess the executive functions of preschool aged children. A total of 65 children four and five years old participated in this study. In order to screen executive functions, we used (1) a go/nogo task, (2) a visual working memory task (3) an auditory working memory task (4) a graph phoneme discrimination task (5) a phonological discrimination task and (6) a visual discrimination task. The results revealed that children at the age of four years old presented lower scores of correct answers and larger latencies in comparison to children at the age of five years. Also, females had more correct answers in the tasks of the web application in comparison to males. Additionally, the main purpose of delivering a screening procedure via internet is to make preschoolers do something useful while perceiving that they are “playing a game”.