Putting the Pieces Together: Exploring the Dimensionality of Enhanced Baking Tray Task Indexes in School-Aged Children

The Enhanced Baking Tray Task (E-BTT) is a spatial task where disks are placed inside a modular frame and a Tangible Users Interface (TUI) system provides ordered coordinates for each disk. Recently two main innovations have been introduced in this version of the task: many quantitative measurements were applied, and it was adapted to children. E-BTT's new indexes refer to laterality (when calculated on the X axis) and verticality (when calculated on the Y axis); moreover, new measures about the quality of the sequence itself were used (some referred to the organization). We firstly calculated the list of indexes recently applied to E-BTT on 1) a sample of 137 school-aged children who completed the task, appropriately adapted to the new type of sample and 2) on a sample of 122 adults. We then applied a Support Vector Machine (SVM) model and cross-validation to the whole dataset to test its accuracy to discriminate, in terms of indexes, between adults and children. We then explored whether the dimensionality of E-BTT indexes reflected the pattern/structure of adults also in the sample of school-aged children. A Principal Component Analysis (PCA) on the indexes was then performed. Results on SVM model showed that it was indeed possibile to discriminate children from adults' indexes. Results on the dimensionality are totally overlapping to adults' results. A distinct component of Laterality and Verticality emerged; furthermore, four components containing indexes that referred to the quality of the spatio-temporal sequence resulted from the elaboration. We then discuss the differences and similarities of PCA dimensionality between adults and children. The fact that the indexes' dimensionality was overlapping in children and adults may confirm its soundness and justify their use for E-BTT data analysis. Moreover, our model supported the idea that, despite the indexes have the same dimensionality in adults and children, there are indeed peculiar differences between the two groups, what is a useful indication for spatial cognition development.