16:30 - 18:00
Parallel sessions 3
16:30 - 18:00
Room: C-Building - N16
Submission 385
Combining Attentional-Control Tasks May Lead to Higher Reliability and Correlations
MixedTopicTalk-06
Presented by: Niels Kempkens
Niels Kempkens 1, Julia Haaf 2, Alodie Rey-Mermet 1, 3
1 UniDistance Suisse, Switzerland
2 University of Potsdam, Germany
3 Vinzenz Pallotti University, Germany
Attentional control refers to the ability to maintain a goal and goal-relevant information in the face of distraction. Measures typically used to assess this ability have been shown to have low reliability and to correlate poorly with one another. Recently, however, higher reliability has been reported when two typical attentional-control tasks were combined in the same trial. This higher reliability was proposed to arise because combining tasks increases distraction, thereby increasing attentional-control variance (i.e., the signal) relative to noise. To capture the effect of the increased distraction, the attentional-control measure was computed as the difference between trials with the highest and the lowest distraction. Although this approach seems promising, there are a few concerns. First, the focus was on one task combination, thus questioning the generalizability of the approach. Second, correlations with other attentional-control tasks were not investigated. Third, the measure may have been affected by low-level learning (i.e. the learning of stimulus and/or response features). To address these concerns, we combined three attentional-control tasks pairwise and estimated reliability and correlations using hierarchical models. Moreover, we controlled for low-level learning by increasing the number of response alternatives and stimulus exemplars. Our results from 422 young adults showed increased reliability (signal-to-noise ratio .20–.25) and moderate correlations (r = .38–.51) across all task combinations. Thus, combining tasks may be a first step to establish better measures of attentional control.