B - 65 Assessing Methods of Executive Ability from Trail Making Test Part B in Mexican-Americans.

Abstract

We investigated three different measures of executive ability derived from the Trail Making Test part B (TMT-B) in Mexican-American adults. Forty-seven Mexican-Americans were administered both TMT part A (TMT-A) and TMT-B, and total time for completion was recorded. Additionally, participants completed The Acculturation Rating Scale for Mexican Americans. Participants were divided into two groups: low-acculturation group (n = 19) and high-acculturation group (n = 28). Independent Sample T-tests were used to examine differences in executive abilities between our acculturation groups. Executive measures included the TMT-B raw score (i.e., seconds to complete TMT-B), the raw score difference (in seconds) between TMT-A and TMT-B (TMT-BA), and the difference between a predicted TMT-B score (TMT-BP) and the obtained TMT-B score (TMT-BBP). Correlations between TMT-B, TMT-BA, and TMT-BBP and other executive functioning tests (i.e., letter fluency, animal naming, & Comalli Stroop Test part C) were evaluated. Results revealed the high-acculturation group outperformed the low-acculturation group on all measures of executive ability derived from TMT-B, p's < 0.05. Furthermore, the high-acculturation group TMT-BA significantly correlated with Comalli Stroop Test part C, r = 0.44, p = 0.021. Finally, no significant correlations between the different measures of executive ability from TMT-B and other executive functioning tests were found in the low-acculturation group. We found the high-acculturation group demonstrated better executive functioning abilities on all three TMT executive ability variables compared to the low-acculturation group. In our high-acculturation sample, TMT-BA executive ability variable correlated with at least one executive functioning measure, which suggests that TMT-BA can be a likely better measure of executive ability than TMT-B or TMT-BBP.