Edinburgh Delirium Test Box
The Word Building Task
The Word Building Task (WBT) is a novel task of sustained attention and reading that was developed to explore whether the deficits in sustained attention could be extended to the domain of language. The WBT continues the development of objective, computerised measures of sustained attention in delirium. In this task, words were presented one letter at a time with an inter-stimulus gap of 3-5 seconds. Twelve words ranging from three to six letters were chosen. Three trial letters and one trial word were given to participant before twelve trials.
Words were chosen for the test that could not be easily predicted and the possibility of it being an alternative word was kept, where possible, until the end of the word. For example, ‘SHORE’ could also be ‘SHORT’,’ SHARE’, or ‘SNORE.’ In addition, words that appeared to be too obvious were not used i.e. ‘POLITE’ was chosen over ‘POLICE.’
A preliminary study found that patients with delirium were found to perform significantly worse than patients with dementia or controls. The median score of patients with delirium was 4 out of 12 while patients with dementia scored 9/12 and controls 11/12. A significant difference was also seen between patients with dementia and controls indicating that the attentional deficits were also present in dementia but not to the same extent as delirium. Performance on the WBT across all groups was noted to decline as letter length increased suggesting that this increase on working memory contributes to task difficulty.