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DGPS2022_Rey-Mermet_withoutAppendix
Conference presentation

Measures of Attention Control Fail to Form a Coherent Factor – And Methodological Limitations Cannot Explain That Away : Talk presented at the 52nd Congress of the German Psychological Society. Hildesheim. Germany.

  • 2022
Higher cognitive functions
attentional control
inhibition
executive functions
reliability
validity
Open access
Open data
English Attentional control – also referred to as executive functions or cognitive control – is our ability to maintain and implement a goal and goal-relevant information in the face of distraction. So far, previous research has failed to provide strong evidence for a psychometric construct of attentional control. This has been argued to result from four methodological limitations: (a) the use of difference scores to measure attentional control, (b) the low reliability of these difference scores, (c) the neglect of individual differences in speed-accuracy trade-offs when only speed or accuracy is used as dependent variable, and (d) the difficulty of isolating attentional control from measurement error. To overcome each of these issues, we re-analyzed the dataset from Rey-Mermet, Gade, and Oberauer (2018), which includes data from a large set of attentional-control tasks from young and older adults. The results showed that even when the difference scores showed acceptable to good split-half reliability estimates (i.e., .61-.88), measures of attentional control failed to correlate with each other and to load on a latent variable. Similarly, bypassing difference scores by using a bifactor modeling approach with highly reliable measures (i.e., .94-.99) results in the same difficulty. Moreover, when accounting for speed-accuracy trade-offs and removing measurement error by combining hierarchical-Bayesian Wiener diffusion modeling with structural equation modeling, we still found no latent variable of attentional control. Therefore, none of the methodological limitations explains the difficulty of establishing a psychometric construct of attentional control. This emphasizes the necessity of rethinking attentional control.
Language
  • English
Classification
Psychology
License
CC BY
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://n2t.net/ark:/51647/srd1322111
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