Getting it right takes time: response time and performance in secondary school students.

The relation between response time and performance in cognitive tasks is increasingly evident. In the present study, we analyzed the effect of participants' spontaneous speed when responding to a mental rotation task. We carried out a data reanalysis from a previous study where a training of 3 practice sessions of 100 trials each was applied.

Goal Orientation Test: An Objective Behavioral Test.

The aim of the present research is to assess goal orientation (mastery and performance) by developing an objective behavioral test. We elaborated the Mastery Performance-Goal Orientation Test, a task that allows assessment of goal orientation along a single dimension. We studied its reliability and validity by conducting two studies.

Test-retest reliability and convergent validity of attention measures.

Recently, numerous pretest-posttest study designs have evaluated attention impairments and effectiveness of attention training. However, some of the attention tasks used in these studies show a lack of temporal stability analysis that reduces confidence in attention training outcomes. We aim to analyze the temporal stability within three attention tasks using different measures of attention (speed measures, accuracy measures, and global attention indexes) and the convergent validity between the measures.

Are we more consistent when talking about ourselves than when behaving? Consistency differences through a questionnaire and an objective task.

The present paper aimed to examine questionnaire response patterns and objective task-based test behavioral patterns in order to analyze the differences people show in consistency. It is hypothesized that people tend to be more consistent when talking about themselves (when describing themselves through verbal statements) that when they solve a task (when behaving). Consistency is computed using the pi* statistic (Hernandez, Rubio, Revuelta, & Santacreu, 2006).

Performance as a function of ability, resources invested, and strategy used.

Computerized tasks allow a more fine-grained analysis of the strategy deployed in a task designed to map a specific ability than the usual assessment on the basis of only the level of performance. Manipulations expected to impair performance sometimes do not have that effect, probably because the level of performance alone can confound the assessment of the ability level if researchers ignore the strategy used. In a study with 1,872 participants, the authors applied the Spatial Orientation Dynamic Test-Revised (J.

Influence of impulsivity-reflexivity when testing dynamic spatial ability: sex and g differences.

This work analyzes the possibility that the differences in the performance of men and women in dynamic spatial tasks such as the Spatial Orientation Dynamic Test-Revised (SODT-R; Santacreu & Rubio, 1998), obtained in previous works, are due to cognitive style (Reflexivity-Impulsivity) or to the speed-accuracy tradeoff (SATO) that the participants implement. If these differences are due to cognitive style, they would be independent of intelligence, whereas if they are due to SATO, they may be associated with intelligence. In this work, 1652 participants, 984 men and 668 women, ages between 18 and 55 years, were assessed.

Solution strategies as possible explanations of individual and sex differences in a dynamic spatial task.

When individuals perform spatial tasks, individual differences emerge in accuracy and speed as well as in the response patterns used to cope with the task. The purpose of this study is to identify, through empirical criteria, the different response patterns or strategies used by individuals when performing the dynamic spatial task presented in the Spatial Orientation Dynamic Test-Revised (SODT-R). Results show that participants can be classified according to their response patterns.

Sex differences in dynamic spatial ability: the unsolved question of performance factors.

Males and females differ in several cognitive abilities, although the largest gap can be found in spatial ability. Some published studies make the claim that performance factors, which can be either subject- or task-related variables, explain these differences. However, previous studies in which performance factors were measured have focused on static spatial tests.

Fluid intelligence, working memory and executive functioning.

The causes underlying the correlation between working memory and fluid intelligence remain unknown. There are some researchers who argue that the answer can be found on the presumed executive component of working memory. However, the available empirical evidence is far from conclusive.

Simulation of habituation to simple and multiple stimuli.

Within the psychological literature there are a number of models that reproduce the defining properties of habituation to a single stimulus. However, most of them do not reproduce the phenomenon of dishabituation shown in empirical studies, consisting in the recovery of a stimulus previously habituated upon the appearance of a novel stimulus. The present work offers a model of habituation which, in addition to reproducing the basic properties of habituation to a stimulus, also does so when more than one stimulus is presented, and thus includes the dishabituation phenomenon.

Simulation of the filtering role of habituation to stimuli.

In the context of a medium-term study designed to integrate the simulation of different types and processes of learning-such as classical, operant, and some cognitive types--one must start with other more elementary ones that are facilitators of the more complex types and processes. Of special interest is habituation, owing to the filtering out of irrelevant stimuli, which means that the simulated agent does not have to respond to them. This paper presents two difference functions constructed to computationally simulate the characteristics that define habituation.

Is static spatial performance distinguishable from dynamic spatial performance? A latent-variable analysis.

There is disagreement among researchers about the distinction between dynamic and static spatial performance. Given that dynamic spatial performance is supposed to be important for some occupations, such as air traffic control (ATC), it is germane to have evidence about the likelihood of that distinction. In the present study, a battery of printed static spatial and reasoning tests were applied to 480 applicants for an ATC training course.