Cognitive slowing in long COVID patients

Here is the 30-second simple reaction time task. The phone version is scaled to a portrait screen and uses finger tapping as a response.

Note: We are currently updating the code to make it work better on the phone. Please contact Sijia (sijia.zhao@psy.ox.ac.uk) if you would like to use it in your research.

The full task reported in our paper on eClinicalMedicine also includes a 10-minute-long Number Vigilance Test (NVT). NVT is designed to assess the performance decrement during sustained visual attention. A single digit (0–9) was presented at the centre of the screen for 0.1 second every second. Participants were instructed to press the spacebar on their keyboard as soon as they saw ‘0’ (the target, presented randomly with a probability of 25%); no response was required for other digits. A semi-transparent jittered checkerboard pattern masked the digits, with the level of difficulty manipulated by adjusting the opacity of the mask. Pilot testing allowed us to obtain an accuracy level of ∼80% in the first minute of the experiment.

Using this task, we previously found that attention declines rapidly over minutes in people who had recovered from mild COVID-19 (Zhao et al. 2022, Brain Communications).

The links below contain both the Simple Reaction Time task and the Number Vigilance task.