The TOLT assesses planning and problem-solving ability of the executive functions. In this test, participants were asked to solve a set of puzzles with graded difficulty levels by arranging a number of colored beads one at a time from a starting position to the desired goal position in as few moves as possible. The test consisted of 3 puzzle types, with 3, 4, and 5 colored beads placed on the same number of pegs, with 7 problems/trials per type and a total of 21 trials. The following performance measures from the sum total of all puzzle types were used in the analysis: (i) excess moves, which is the additional moves beyond the minimum moves required to solve the puzzle (“ExcMovMade_All”); (ii) average pickup time, which is the initial thinking/planning time spent until picking up the first bead to solve the puzzle (“AvgPicTime_All”); (iii) average total time, which is the total thinking/planning time to solve the problem in each puzzle type (“AvgTotTime_All”); (iv) total trial time, which is the total performance/execution time spent on all trials within each puzzle type (“TotTrlTime_All”); and (v) average trial time, which is the mean performance/execution time across trials per puzzle type (“AvgTrlTime_All”).
