Effects of parental presence and child characteristics on children's neuropsychological test performance: third party observer effect confirmed.

An observer's presence during neuropsychological testing can impair task performance in adults, but this phenomenon has yet to be examined as it pertains to neuropsychological testing of children. The current study focused on parental presence effects on nonverbal intelligence and verbal learning performance of children aged 6 to 8 years. Each of 53 children completed one form of the Test of Nonverbal Intelligence-3rd Edition (TONI-3) and the Selective Reminding Test (SRT) with his/her parent in the room and an alternate form of each with only the experimenter with the child in the testing room. Of several possible covariates, only the child's age was significant and included in final analyses. Using a doubly multivariate MANCOVA it was discovered that parent's observation status significantly interacted with the order of observation to impact task performance. This significant effect can mainly be attributed to a steeper positive slope (i.e., children's greater improvement over time) for TONI-3 T scores in children whose parent observed first; children whose parents were absent for the first half of testing improved to a lesser extent over time. No significant relationship was found between observation and SRT scores. These results lend some support to the assertion of previous studies that the presence of third party observers may affect the validity of neuropsychological test results.