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Figure D3. Structural equation model testing whether visual arrays solely mediates the working memory capacity/fluid intelligence relationship. Working memory capacity comprising operation span, symmetry span, and rotation span with respective loadings of .62, .80, and .79; fluid intelligence comprised Raven, number series, and letter sets with respective loadings of .75, .72, and .73 (N 396). This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
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Cognitive tasks that produce reliable and robust effects at the group level often fail to yield reliable and valid individual differences. An ongoing debate in the attention literature is whether conflict resolution mechanisms are task-specific or domain-general, and the lack of correlation between most attention measures seems to favor the view th...
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Aging is characterized by changes in sensory and cognitive abilities. While there is evidence that decline in sensory acuity and enhanced multisensory integration predict cognitive status in healthy older adults, potential mechanistic links between these age-related alterations remain unclear. In the current study, we assessed performance of younge...
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... We used overall measures of accuracy and reaction time in this model because condition difference scores can be unstable (combining the noise inherent in both variables). Indeed, Draheim et al. (2019) suggested that the lack of correlation between attention measures in many studies may be due to methodological issues with attention capture tasks, rather than that attention not representing an unified concept. ...
Visual attention is an important mechanism through which children learn about their environment, and individual differences could substantially shape later development. This study investigates the feasibility of a comprehensive eye-tracking assessment of visual attention and introduces a shared data resource for the scientific community. Data from eight eyetracking tasks were collected from 350 term-born (166 females) 18-month-olds recruited as neonates http://www.developingconnectome.org/). Analyses showed expected condition effects for seven of eight tasks ( p -values from <.001 to .04) . Consistent with some theoretical models of visual attention, structural equation modelling indicated participants' performance could be explained by two factors representing social and non-social attention. Comprehensive eye-tracking batteries can objectively measure individual differences in core components of visual attention in large-scale toddlerhood studies. This is the first large-scale comprehensive study to present high-quality normative eye-tracking data from a large task battery in toddlers and make them freely available to the scientific community.
... First, older adults are generally slower in reaction time relative to young adults due to their lack of familiarity with computerised tasks that require pressing on response keys. Second, accuracy scores have been found to be preferable for studying individual differences in cognitive control, since older adults prefer to respond slowly and accurately and are typically less willing to trade accuracy for speed even when instructed to respond quickly (Draheim, Tsukahara, Martin, Mashburn & Engle, 2019). Given this, accuracy seems to be a more appropriate measure than RT for older adults. ...
Drawing on the adaptive control hypothesis, we examined whether older adults’ bilingual interactional contexts of conversational exchanges would predict important indices of executive functions (EF). We assessed participants’ engagement in each bilingual interactional context – single-language, dual-language, and dense code-switching – and their performance on a series of nonverbal EF measures. Sixty-nine healthy older adults (M age = 70.39 years; ages 60–93) were recruited from local community centers. We found that the dense code-switching context was associated with enhanced overall EF, but not individual facets of EF (inhibitory control, shifting, and updating). These findings held true when we controlled for a host of covariates. Our findings shed light on aging bilinguals’ interactional contexts as crucial bilingual experiences that modulate overall EF. Given that bilingualism is a multidimensional construct, rather than a unidimensional variable, our study underscores the importance of more fine-grained operationalisation of bilingualism when studying its impacts on EF.
... Although task correlations were somewhat higher when using IES compared to standard RT difference scores, they were still relatively small and often insignificant. More recent findings suggest the reliance on accuracy-based measures (Draheim, Tsukahara, Martin, Mashburn, & Engle, 2019) or accounting for trial-by-trial variability (Rouder & Haaf, 2019) as more promising approaches. ...
Need for Cognition (NFC) refers to a personality trait describing the relatively stable intrinsic motivation of individuals to invest cognitive effort in cognitive endeavors. Higher NFC is associated with a more elaborated, central information processing style and increased recruitment of resources in cognitively demanding situations. To further clarify the association between cognitive resources and NFC, we examined in two studies how NFC relates to executive functions as basic cognitive abilities. In Study 1, 189 healthy young adults completed a NFC scale and a battery of six commonly used inhibitory control tasks (Stroop, antisaccade, stop-signal, flanker, shape-matching, word-naming). In Study 2, 102 healthy young adults completed the NFC scale and two tasks for each of the three executive functions inhibitory control (go-nogo, stop-signal), shifting (number-letter, color-shape) and working memory updating (two-back, letter-memory). Using a Bayesian approach to correlation analysis, we found no conclusive evidence that NFC was related to any executive function measure. Instead, we obtained even moderate evidence for the null hypothesis. Both studies add to more recent findings that shape the understanding of NFC as a trait that is less characterized by increased cognitive control abilities but rather by increased willingness to invest effort and exert self-control via motivational processes.
Self-regulation, the ability to guide behavior according to one’s goals, plays an integral role in understanding loss of control over unwanted behaviors, for example in alcohol use disorder (AUD). Yet, experimental tasks that measure processes underlying self-regulation are not easy to deploy in contexts where such behaviors usually occur, namely outside the laboratory, and in clinical populations such as people with AUD. Moreover, lab-based tasks have been criticized for poor test–retest reliability and lack of construct validity. Smartphones can be used to deploy tasks in the field, but often require shorter versions of tasks, which may further decrease reliability. Here, we show that combining smartphone-based tasks with joint hierarchical modeling of longitudinal data can overcome at least some of these shortcomings. We test four short smartphone-based tasks outside the laboratory in a large sample ( N = 488) of participants with AUD. Although task measures indeed have low reliability when data are analyzed traditionally by modeling each session separately, joint modeling of longitudinal data increases reliability to good and oftentimes excellent levels. We next test the measures’ construct validity and show that extracted latent factors are indeed in line with theoretical accounts of cognitive control and decision-making. Finally, we demonstrate that a resulting cognitive control factor relates to a real-life measure of drinking behavior and yields stronger correlations than single measures based on traditional analyses. Our findings demonstrate how short, smartphone-based task measures, when analyzed with joint hierarchical modeling and latent factor analysis, can overcome frequently reported shortcomings of experimental tasks.
The present study examined individual differences in 3 cognitive abilities: attention control (AC), working memory capacity (WMC), and fluid intelligence (gF) as they relate the tendency to experience task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs) and the regulation of arousal. Cognitive abilities were measured with a battery of 9 laboratory tasks, TUTs were measured via thought probes inserted into 2 tasks, and arousal regulation was measured via pupillometry. Recent theorizing (Unsworth & Robison, 2017b) suggests that 1 reason why some people experience relatively frequent TUTs and relatively poor cognitive performance-especially AC and WMC-is that they exhibit dysregulated arousal. Here, we examined how arousal regulation might predict both AC and WMC, but also higher-order cognitive abilities like gF. Further, we examine direct and indirect associations with these abilities via a mediating influence of TUT. Participants who reported more TUTs also tended to exhibit poorer AC, lower WMC, and lower gF. Arousal dysregulation correlated with more TUTs and lower AC. However, there was no direct correlation between arousal regulation and WMC, nor between arousal regulation and gF. The association between arousal regulation and gF was indirect via TUT. We discuss the implications of the results in light of the arousal regulation theory of individual differences and directions for future research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
Intro
Need for Cognition (NFC) refers to a personality trait describing the relatively stable intrinsic motivation of individuals to invest cognitive effort in cognitive endeavors. Higher NFC is associated with a more elaborated, central information processing style and increased recruitment of resources in cognitively demanding situations. To further clarify the association between cognitive resources and NFC, we examined in two studies how NFC relates to executive functions as basic cognitive abilities.
Methods
In Study 1, 189 healthy young adults completed a NFC scale and a battery of six commonly used inhibitory control tasks (Stroop, antisaccade, stop‐signal, flanker, shape‐matching, word‐naming). In Study 2, 102 healthy young adults completed the NFC scale and two tasks for each of the three executive functions inhibitory control (go‐nogo, stop‐signal), shifting (number‐letter, color‐shape) and working memory updating (two‐back, letter‐memory).
Results
Using a Bayesian approach to correlation analysis, we found no conclusive evidence that NFC was related to any executive function measure. Instead, we obtained even moderate evidence for the null hypothesis.
Conclusion
Both studies add to more recent findings that shape the understanding of NFC as a trait that is less characterized by increased cognitive control abilities but rather by increased willingness to invest effort and exert self‐control via motivational processes.
The present study examined individual differences in three cognitive abilities: attention control (AC), working memory capacity (WMC), and fluid intelligence (gF) as they relate the tendency to experience task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs) and the regulation of arousal. Cognitive abilities were measured with a battery of nine laboratory tasks, TUTs were measured via thought probes inserted into two tasks, and arousal regulation was measured via pupillometry. Recent theorizing (Robison & Unsworth, 2017a) suggests that one reason why some people experience relatively frequent TUTs and relatively poor cognitive performance - especially AC and WMC - is that they exhibit dysregulated arousal. Here, we examined how arousal regulation might predict both AC and WMC, but also higher-order cognitive abilities like gF. Further, we examine direct and indirect associations with these abilities via a mediating influence of TUT. Participants who reported more TUTs also tended to exhibit poorer AC, lower WMC, and lower gF. Arousal dysregulation correlated with more TUTs and lower AC. However there was no direct correlation between arousal regulation and WMC, nor between arousal regulation and gF. Rather, the associations between arousal regulation, WMC, and gF were indirect via TUT. We discuss the implications of the results in light of the arousal regulation theory of individual differences and directions for future research.
Individual differences in cognitive control have been suggested to act as a domain-general bottleneck constraining performance in a variety of cognitive ability measures, including but not limited to fluid intelligence, working memory capacity, and processing speed. However, owing to psychometric problems associated with the measurement of individual differences in cognitive control, it has been challenging to empirically test the assumption that individual differences in cognitive control underlie individual differences in cognitive abilities. In the present study, we addressed these issues by analyzing the chronometry of intelligence-related differences in midfrontal global theta connectivity, which has been shown to reflect cognitive control functions. We demonstrate in a sample of 98 adults, who completed a cognitive control task while their electroencephalogram was recorded, that individual differences in midfrontal global theta connectivity during stages of higher-order information-processing explained 65% of the variance in fluid intelligence. In comparison, task-evoked theta connectivity during earlier stages of information processing was not related to fluid intelligence. These results suggest that more intelligent individuals benefit from an adaptive modulation of theta-band synchronization during the time-course of information processing. Moreover, they emphasize the role of interregional goal-directed information-processing for cognitive control processes in human intelligence and support theoretical accounts of intelligence, which propose that individual differences in cognitive control processes give rise to individual differences in cognitive abilities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
Intelligence is correlated with the ability to make fine sensory discriminations. Although this relationship has been known since the beginning of intelligence testing, the mechanisms underlying this relationship are still unknown. In two large-scale structural equation-modelling studies, we investigated whether individual differences in attention control abilities can explain the relationship between sensory discrimination and intelligence. Across these two studies, we replicated the finding that attention control fully mediated the relationships of intelligence/working-memory capacity to sensory discrimination. Our findings show that attention control plays a prominent role in relating sensory discrimination to higher-order cognitive abilities.
