Retest Reliability of Integrated Speed–Accuracy Measures
Tamar Bakun Emesh, Dror Garbi, Alon Kaplan, Hila Zelicha, Anat Yaskolka Meir, Gal Tsaban, Ehud Rinott, Nachshon Meiran
Abstract
Cognitive tasks borrowed from experimental psychology are often used to assess individual differences. A cardinal issue of this transition from experimental to correlational designs is reduced retest reliability of some well-established cognitive effects as well as speed-accuracy trade-off. The present study aimed to address these issues by examining the retest reliability of various methods for speed-accuracy integration and by comparing between two types of task modeling: difference scores and residual scores. Results from three studies on executive functions show that (a) integrated speed-accuracy scoring is generally more reliable as compared with nonintegrated methods: mean response time and accuracy; and (b) task modeling, especially residual scores, reduced reliability. We thus recommend integrating speed and accuracy, at least for measuring executive functions.