The brief mind wandering three-factor scale (BMW-3).

In recent years, researchers from different fields have become increasingly interested in measuring individual differences in mind wandering as a psychological trait. Although there are several questionnaires that allow for an assessment of people's perceptions of their mind wandering experiences, they either define mind wandering in a very broad sense or do not sufficiently separate different aspects of mind wandering. Here, we introduce the Brief Mind Wandering Three-Factor Scale (BMW-3), a 12-item questionnaire available in German and English.

Sequential analysis of variance: Increasing efficiency of hypothesis testing.

Researchers commonly use analysis of variance (ANOVA) to statistically test results of factorial designs. Performing an a priori power analysis is crucial to ensure that the ANOVA is sufficiently powered, however, it often poses a challenge and can result in large sample sizes, especially if the expected effect size is small. Due to the high prevalence of small effect sizes in psychology, studies are frequently underpowered as it is often economically unfeasible to gather the necessary sample size for adequate Type-II error control.

Reliability of variability and complexity measures for task and task-free BOLD fMRI.

Brain activity continuously fluctuates over time, even if the brain is in controlled (e.g., experimentally induced) states.

The common factor of executive functions measures nothing but speed of information uptake.

There is an ongoing debate about the unity and diversity of executive functions and their relationship with other cognitive abilities such as processing speed, working memory capacity, and intelligence. Specifically, the initially proposed unity and diversity of executive functions is challenged by discussions about (1) the factorial structure of executive functions and (2) unfavorable psychometric properties of measures of executive functions. The present study addressed two methodological limitations of previous work that may explain conflicting results: The inconsistent use of (a) accuracy-based vs.

Cognitive deficits and enhancements in youth from adverse conditions: An integrative assessment using Drift Diffusion Modeling in the ABCD study.

Childhood adversity can lead to cognitive deficits or enhancements, depending on many factors. Though progress has been made, two challenges prevent us from integrating and better understanding these patterns. First, studies commonly use and interpret raw performance differences, such as response times, which conflate different stages of cognitive processing.

An explorative multiverse study for extracting differences in P3 latencies between young and old adults.

It is well established that P3 latencies increase with age. Investigating these age-related differences requires numerous methodological decisions, resulting in pipelines of great variation. The aim of the present work was to investigate the effects of different analytical pipelines on the age-related differences in P3 latencies in real data.

Enhancing precision in human neuroscience.

Human neuroscience has always been pushing the boundary of what is measurable. During the last decade, concerns about statistical power and replicability - in science in general, but also specifically in human neuroscience - have fueled an extensive debate. One important insight from this discourse is the need for larger samples, which naturally increases statistical power.

Fluid Intelligence Is (Much) More than Working Memory Capacity: An Experimental Analysis.

Empirical evidence suggests a great positive association between measures of fluid intelligence and working memory capacity, which implied to some researchers that fluid intelligence is little more than working memory. Because this conclusion is mostly based on correlation analysis, a causal relationship between fluid intelligence and working memory has not yet been established. The aim of the present study was therefore to provide an experimental analysis of this relationship.

Working memory load affects intelligence test performance by reducing the strength of relational item bindings and impairing the filtering of irrelevant information.

There is a broad consensus that individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) are strongly related to individual differences in intelligence. However, correlational studies do not allow conclusions about the causal nature of the relationship between WMC and fluid intelligence. While research on the cognitive basis of intelligence typically assumes that simpler lower-level cognitive processes contribute to individual differences in higher-order reasoning processes, a reversed causality or a third variable giving rise to two intrinsically uncorrelated variables may exist.

How robust is the relationship between neural processing speed and cognitive abilities?

Individual differences in processing speed are consistently related to individual differences in cognitive abilities, but the mechanisms through which a higher processing speed facilitates reasoning remain largely unknown. To identify these mechanisms, researchers have been using latencies of the event-related potential (ERP) to study how the speed of cognitive processes associated with specific ERP components is related to cognitive abilities. Although there is some evidence that latencies of ERP components associated with higher-order cognitive processes are related to intelligence, results are overall quite inconsistent.

Predictors of stockpiling behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany.

Aim: With the COVID-19 pandemic, we witnessed an increase in purchases of certain products, such as toilet paper, disinfectants, or groceries. In the present study, we examined the individual and socio-psychological determinants of stockpiling behavior. For this purpose, we defined an explanatory model based on the Health Belief Model (HBM), which includes threat perceptions, barriers and benefits, and self-efficacy beliefs as main predictors of health-related behaviors, and extended the model to include social norms.

A neurocognitive psychometrics account of individual differences in attentional control.

Attention control processes play an important role in many substantial psychological theories but are hard to reliably and validly measure on the subject-level. Therefore, associations between individual differences in attentional control and other variables are often inconsistent. Here we propose a novel neurocognitive psychometrics account of attentional control that integrates model parameters from the dual-stage two-phase model (Hübner et al.

Do Attentional Lapses Account for the Worst Performance Rule?

The worst performance rule (WPR) describes the phenomenon that individuals' slowest responses in a task are often more predictive of their intelligence than their fastest or average responses. To explain this phenomenon, it was previously suggested that occasional lapses of attention during task completion might be associated with particularly slow reaction times. Because less intelligent individuals should experience lapses of attention more frequently, reaction time distribution should be more heavily skewed for them than for more intelligent people.

Diagnostic value of skin RT-QuIC in Parkinson's disease: a two-laboratory study.

Skin α-synuclein deposition is considered a potential biomarker for Parkinson's disease (PD). Real-time quaking-induced conversion (RT-QuIC) is a novel, ultrasensitive, and efficient seeding assay that enables the detection of minute amounts of α-synuclein aggregates. We aimed to determine the diagnostic accuracy, reliability, and reproducibility of α-synuclein RT-QuIC assay of skin biopsy for diagnosing PD and to explore its correlation with clinical markers of PD in a two-center inter-laboratory comparison study.

Do Individual Effects Reflect Quantitative or Qualitative Differences in Cognition?

Rouder and Haaf (2020) posed the important question if there are some individuals whose behavior is not in accordance with well-established experimental effects and whether these individual differences are quantitative or qualitative in nature. In our commentary, we discuss the distinction between quantitative and qualitative individual differences and between individual and average causal effects and come to the conclusion that this is not a new question, but in fact one that has already been discussed by Gordon W. Allport (1937) and Donald B.

How consistent is mind wandering across situations and tasks? A latent state-trait analysis.

Mind wandering is often defined as the phenomenon of one's attention drifting away from the current activity toward inner thoughts and feelings. In the laboratory, mind wandering is most frequently assessed with thought reports that are collected while people perform some ongoing activity. It is not clear, however, inasmuch the resulting mind-wandering reports are reflective of person-consistent mind-wandering tendencies and/or situation-driven fluctuations in mind-wandering behavior.

An Investigation of the Slope Parameters of Reaction Times and P3 Latencies in the Sternberg Memory Scanning Task - A Fixed-Links Model Approach.

The speed of short-term memory scanning is thought to be captured in the slope of the linear function of mean reaction times (RTs) regressed on set size in the Sternberg memory scanning task (SMST). Individual differences in the slope parameter have been hypothesized to correlate with general intelligence (). However, this correlation can usually not be found.

A diffusion model analysis of belief bias: Different cognitive mechanisms explain how cognitive abilities and thinking styles contribute to conflict resolution in reasoning.

Recent results have challenged the widespread assumption of dual process models of belief bias that sound reasoning relies on slow, careful reflection, whereas biased reasoning is based on fast intuition. Instead, parallel process models of reasoning suggest that rule- and belief-based problem features are processed in parallel and that reasoning problems that elicit a conflict between rule- and belief-based problem features may also elicit more than one Type 1 response. This has important implications for individual-differences research on reasoning, because rule-based responses by certain individuals may reflect that these individuals were either more likely to give a rule-based default response or that they successfully inhibited and overrode a belief-based default response.

Do Non-Decision Times Mediate the Association between Age and Intelligence across Different Content and Process Domains?

In comparison to young adults, middle-aged and old people show lower scores in intelligence tests and slower response times in elementary cognitive tasks. Whether these well-documented findings can both be attributed to a general cognitive slow-down across the life-span has become subject to debate in the last years. The drift diffusion model can disentangle three main process components of binary decisions, namely the speed of information processing, the conservatism of the decision criterion and the non-decision time (i.

The Evidence for Geary's Theory on the Role of Mitochondrial Functioning in Human Intelligence Is Not Entirely Convincing.

Geary (2018, 2019) suggested that heritable and environmentally caused differences in mitochondrial functioning affect the integrity and efficiency of neurons and supporting glia cells and may thus contribute to individual differences in higher-order cognitive functioning and physical health. In our comment, we want to pose three questions aimed at different aspects of Geary's theory that critically evaluate his theory in the light of evidence from neurocognitive, cognitive enhancement, and behavioral genetics research. We question (1) if Geary's theory explains why certain cognitive processes show a stronger age-related decline than others; (2) if intervention studies in healthy younger adults support the claim that variation in mitochondrial functioning underlies variation in human intelligence; and (3) if predictions arising from the matrilineal heredity of mitochondrial DNA are supported by behavioral genetics research.

A chronometric model of the relationship between frontal midline theta functional connectivity and human intelligence.

Individual differences in cognitive control have been suggested to act as a domain-general bottleneck constraining performance in a variety of cognitive ability measures, including but not limited to fluid intelligence, working memory capacity, and processing speed. However, owing to psychometric problems associated with the measurement of individual differences in cognitive control, it has been challenging to empirically test the assumption that individual differences in cognitive control underlie individual differences in cognitive abilities. In the present study, we addressed these issues by analyzing the chronometry of intelligence-related differences in midfrontal global theta connectivity, which has been shown to reflect cognitive control functions.

Diffusion modeling and intelligence: Drift rates show both domain-general and domain-specific relations with intelligence.

Several previous studies reported relationships between speed of information processing as measured with the drift parameter of the diffusion model (Ratcliff, 1978) and general intelligence. Most of these studies utilized only few tasks and none of them used more complex tasks. In contrast, our study ( = 125) was based on a large battery of 18 different response time tasks that varied both in content (numeric, figural, and verbal) and complexity (fast tasks with mean RTs of ca.

Inter-trial alpha power indicates mind wandering.

Mind wandering during ongoing tasks can impede task performance and increase the risk of failure in the laboratory as well as in daily-life tasks and work environments. Neurocognitive measures like the electroencephalography (EEG) offer the opportunity to assess mind wandering non-invasively without interfering with the primary task. However, the literature on electrophysiological correlates of mind wandering is rather inconsistent.