Comparison of Visual-Motor Performance and Nonverbal Reasoning among Child and Adolescent Patients in an Urban Psychiatric Hospital

Abstract

Two groups of young psychiatric- inpatients were used to compare performance on the Test of Nonverbal Reasoning and the Developmental Test of Visual-motor Integration. The older group of 230 had a mean age of 15.7 yr. and produced a product-moment correlation of .64 for the two tests. The younger group of 81 had a mean age of 11.3 yr; scores correlated .53. On the TONI, the performance of the adolescent girls was superior to that of the boys. On the Test of Visual-motor Integration, the younger girls appeared to outscore the boys, but an analysis of variance of sex differences with age as covariate fell short of significance. Results were explained in terms of subjects' differing school experience in their development of vasomotor and visual-reasoning skills. Caution was advised in the application of age-based test norms to special populations.

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