Maria Lialiou

This test battery is a collection of open-source modified versions of the Flanker, Odd-man-out, and Simon tasks implemented in OpenSesame (Mathôt et al. 2012), as well as a modified auditory version of a digit span task (Wechsler 1987) implemented in SoSci Survey (Leiner 2019).

This battery measures individual cognitive variability in terms of inhibitory ability (Flanker and Simon tasks), processing speed (Odd-man-out task), and working memory capacity (Digit span task) and it was developed as part of the doctoral project by Maria Lialiou (A01) as a means of better understanding the function of the attention orienting response. Her data show that the cognitive bandwidth deployed by individuals in processing auditory deviancies is critical for the effective activation of the attentional system (the orienting response) as well as its protection from potential overload.

Although a large number of studies investigating individual variability during cognitive or language processing examine cognitive functions like the aforementioned, the corresponding tasks are not fully available for use (at least to our knowledge). Thus, the present repository aims to share these cognitive tasks with other researchers interested in cognitive variability to boost reproducibility and also save time from creating/coding the same tasks over and over again.

References

Eriksen, Barbara A. & Charles W. Eriksen. 1974. Effects of noise letters upon the identification of a target letter in a nonsearch task. Perception & Psychophysics 16(1). 143–149.

Frearson, Warwick & Hans J. Eysenck. 1986. Intelligence, reaction time (RT) and a new ”odd-man-out” RT paradigm. Personality and Individual Differences 7(6). 807–817.

Leiner, Dominik J. 2024. SoSci Survey. www.soscisurvey.de

Mathôt, Sebastiaan, Daniel Schreij & Jan Theeuwes. 2012. OpenSesame: an opensource, graphical experiment builder for the social sciences. Behavior Research Methods 44(2). 314–324.

Wechsler, David. 1987. WMS-R: Wechsler Memory Scale – Revised: Manual. San Antonio: Psychological Corporation, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.