ArticleBehavior research methods2023
Can we measure individual differences in cognitive measures reliably via smartphones? A comparison of the flanker effect across device types and samples.
Article in Behavior research methods, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- A Pocket Laboratory for Functional Neuroimaging Research Using Mobile Visual Oddball, Multimodal Electroencephalography, and Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Imaging: Instrument Validation Study.JMIR neurotechnology · 2026Article
- Assessing the reliability of an online measure of the temporal binding window of audiovisual integration.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Precise individual measures of inhibitory control.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Executive Function and Transfer Effect Training in Children: A Behavioral and Event-Related Potential Pilot Study.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Attentional load impacts multisensory integration, without leading to spatial processing asymmetries.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Individual differences in online research: Comparing lab-based and online administration of a psycholinguistic battery of linguistic and domain-general skills.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- A jsPsych touchscreen extension for behavioral research on touch-enabled interfaces.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Implementation of an online spacing flanker task and evaluation of its test-retest reliability using measures of inhibitory control and the distribution of spatial attention.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- A measure of reliability convergence to select and optimize cognitive tasks for individual differences research.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- On the psychometric evaluation of cognitive control tasks: An Investigation with the Dual Mechanisms of Cognitive Control (DMCC) battery.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Benefiting from binary negations? Verbal negations decrease visual attention and balance its distribution.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- jsQuestPlus: A JavaScript implementation of the QUEST+ method for estimating psychometric function parameters in online experiments.Behavior research methods · 2023Article
- Improving the Reliability of Cognitive Task Measures: A Narrative Review.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Research deployed via the internet and administered via smartphones could have access to more diverse samples than lab-based research. Diverse samples could have relatively high variation in their traits and so yield relatively reliable measurements of individual differences in these traits. Several cognitive tasks that originated from the experimental research tradition have been reported to yield relatively low reliabilities (Hedge et al., 2018) in samples with restricted variance (students). This issue could potentially be addressed by smartphone-mediated administration in diverse samples. We formulate several criteria to determine whether a cognitive task is suitable for individual differences research on commodity smartphones: no very brief or precise stimulus timing, relative response times (RTs), a maximum of two response options, and a small number of graphical stimuli. The flanker task meets these criteria. We compared the reliability of individual differences in the flanker effect across samples and devices in a preregistered study. We found no evidence that a more diverse sample yields higher reliabilities. We also found no evidence that commodity smartphones yield lower reliabilities than commodity laptops. Hence, diverse samples might not improve reliability above student samples, but smartphones may well measure individual differences with cognitive tasks reliably. Exploratively, we examined different reliability coefficients, split-half reliabilities, and the development of reliability estimates as a function of task length.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.