Zola Bongo: Enabling Offline Tablet-Based Cognitive Testing in Diverse Populations

Diversifying psychology through including understudied populations is a well agreed upon goal within the field (Corrington et al., 2020). However, several challenges hinder progress towards achieving this goal. One major challenge is accessibility. Reaching understudied populations often requires testing participants in their communities. In our work with different populations in Africa, touch screen tablets are an excellent tool for enabling data collection in community settings. They work well with participants of all ages, including those with little to no exposure to technology or formal education. However, developing tablet-based cognitive tasks that function without internet connection typically requires knowledge of app development and programming skills beyond that available to many researchers. To fill this gap, we created ZolaBongo, a tablet-based application supporting tasks created in commonly used open-source experiment builders such as PsychoPy. We tested ZolaBongo with children (age 4+, N = 170) and adults (N = 178) at two sites, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in South Africa. Specifically, we tested a set of short cognitive tasks, measuring reasoning, executive function, and working memory. These tasks were chosen by our community of practice, The African Brain and Cognitive Development Network (AfriBCD). We show that collecting data on these tasks using ZolaBongo works. Our hope is that ZolaBongo will make it easier to translate, adapt, or create new measures, all necessary steps to facilitate research with diverse populations and contexts.