Hauptinhalt

Fachbereichskolloquium: Dr. Jean-Paul Snijder

„On the Psychometric Evaluation of Cognitive Control Tasks: An Investigation with the Dual Mechanisms of Cog-nitive Control (DMCC) Battery”

Veranstaltungsdaten

Dr. Jean-Paul Snijder, Universität Heidelberg
„On the Psychometric Evaluation of Cognitive Control Tasks: An Investigation with the Dual Mechanisms of Cognitive Control (DMCC) Battery”

Cognitive control, also known as attentional control or executive function, is a set of fundamental attentional processes that are utilized in a wide range of cognitive functioning, including working memory, reasoning, problem solving, and decision making. Currently, no existing theory of cognitive control unifies experimental and psychometric approaches. Some even argue that cognitive control as a psychometric construct does not exist at all. This disparity may exist in part because individual differences research in cognitive control utilizes tasks and analyses optimized for experimental effects (i.e., Stroop effect). As a result, many cognitive control tasks do not have reliable individual differences despite robust experimental effects (Hedge et al., 2018).
In my talk, I present the psychometric properties of a new cognitive control task battery based on the Dual Mechanisms of Cognitive Control theory (DMCC; Braver, 2012). The battery includes theorybased variants of classic cognitive control tasks (Stroop, AX-CPT, Sternberg, task-switching), with proactive and reactive control taskmanipulations aimed at introducing more between-subject variability in cognitive control. With two sets of analyses, the first traditional (e.g., splithalf, ICC), and the second hierarchical Bayesian, we conclude that reliable individual differences can be extracted from the task battery, but the common weak correlations between tasks of cognitive control remain. I will show that our attempt at creating new tasks based on a theoretical framework and addressing commonly suggested measurement issues still results in an evasive psychometric construct of cognitive control remains.