ArticleJournal of cognition2024
Interindividual Differences in Cognitive Variability Are Ubiquitous and Distinct From Mean Performance in a Battery of Eleven Tasks.
Article in Journal of cognition, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Observation Moderates the Moral Licensing Effect: A Meta-Analytic Test of Interpersonal and Intrapsychic Mechanisms.Personality & social psychology bulletin · 2026Pooled it
- Intra-Individual Variability in Children's Self-Regulation in Kindergarten Classrooms: An Observational Study.Developmental science · 2026Observational
- Trial-By-Trial Changes in Neural Indices of Performance Monitoring Uniquely Correspond to Behavioral Adjustments During a Flanker Task.Human brain mapping · 2026Article
- The role of NLRP3 neuroinflammation in cognitive frailty diversity during aging and after LPS administration in mice.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The construct validity of daily cognitive variability.Psychology and aging · 2026Article
- Cereblon-related mild intellectual disability disrupts response inhibition and uniformity of group-individual strategies.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2026Article
- Oral microbiome signatures of ageing and cognitive function across distinct geographical cohorts.PloS one · 2026Article
- Identification of Reliable Target Brain Regions for Enhancing Object-Location Memory by Brain Stimulation.Brain and behavior · 2025Article
- Brief mind-body exercise in high-latitude aging: reduced sedentarism and domain-specific cognitive/social benefits.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Advancing personalized digital therapeutics: integrating music therapy, brainwave entrainment methods, and AI-driven biofeedback.Frontiers in digital health · 2025Review
- Article
- Credibility revolution: pursuing a balanced and sustainable approach, without dogmas, without magic elixirs.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Protocol and preregistration for the CODEC project: measuring, modelling and mechanistically understanding the nature of cognitive variability in early childhood.BMC psychology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Our performance on cognitive tasks fluctuates: the same individual completing the same task will differ in their response's moment-to-moment. For decades cognitive fluctuations have been implicitly ignored - treated as measurement error - with a focus instead on aggregates such as mean performance. Leveraging dense trial-by-trial data and novel time-series methods we explored variability as an intrinsically important phenotype. Across eleven cognitive tasks with over 7 million trials, we found highly reliable interindividual differences in cognitive variability in every task we examined. These differences are both qualitatively and quantitatively distinct from mean performance. Moreover, we found that a single dimension for variability across tasks was inadequate, demonstrating that previously posited global mechanisms for cognitive variability are at least partially incomplete. Our findings indicate that variability is a fundamental part of cognition - with the potential to offer novel insights into developmental processes.
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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.