Within-person structures of daily cognitive performance cannot be inferred from between-person structures of cognitive abilities

First published online: 09 June 2020Over a century of research on between-person differences has resulted in the consensus that human cognitive abilities are hierarchically organized, with a general factor, termed general intelligence or "g," uppermost. Surprisingly, it is unknown whether this body of evidence is informative about how cognition is structured within individuals. Using data from 101 young adults performing nine cognitive tasks on 100 occasions distributed over six months, we find that the structures of individuals' cognitive abilities vary among each other, and deviate greatly from the modal between-person structure. Working memory contributes the largest share of common variance to both between- and within-person structures, but the g factor is much less prominent within than between persons. We conclude that between-person structures of cognitive abilities cannot serve as a surrogate for within-person structures. To reveal the development and organization of human intelligence, individuals need to be studied over time

Affective states contribute to trait reports of affective well-being

Asking people to provide global judgments, or trait reports, of their affective experience is a standard method for assessing trait affective well-being, with countless applications in the social sciences. Trait reports reflect numerous influences that generally go unnoticed. Although state affect is a highly plausible candidate for such influences, this source of unwanted variance does not receive much attention and is usually not controlled for in empirical studies. Using 100-day data from the COGITO study, we provide direct and strong evidence that trait reports of affect depend on how people feel at the time they provide the evaluations (i.e., their affective state). For example, participants experiencing more positive affect on a specific day relative to their individual mean also provide more positive ratings of their global affective experience. Furthermore, we found that current affect influences trait ratings in a surprisingly differentiated way—those particular facets of affect that are more/less prevalent at a certain moment are believed to occur more/less often in general. We stress the need for repeated observations within individuals to estimate state contributions to standard assessments of trait affect, to distinguish between state and trait in psychological assessment, and to achieve good indicators of affective experiences in the social and medical sciences

Toward a unified framework for the study of between-person and within-person structures : Building a bridge between two research paradigms

The vast majority of empirical research in the behavioral sciences is based on the analysis of between-person variation. In contrast, much of applied psychology is concerned with the analysis of variation within individuals. Furthermore, the mechanisms specified by psychological theories generally operate within, rather than across, individuals. This disconnect between research practice, applied demands, and psychological theories constitutes a major threat to the conceptual integrity of the field. Following groundbreaking earlier work, we propose a conceptual framework that distinguishes within-person (WP) and between-person (BP) sources of variation in psychological constructs. By simultaneously considering both sources of variation, it is shown how to identify possible reasons for nonequivalence of BP and WP structures as well as establishing areas of convergence. For this purpose, we first introduce the concept of conditional equivalence as a way to study partial structural equivalence of BP and WP structures in the presence of unconditional nonequivalence. Second, we demonstrate the construction of likelihood planes to explore the causes of structural nonequivalence. Third, we examine 4 common causes for unconditional nonequivalence autoregression, subgroup differences, linear trends, and cyclic trends-and demonstrate how to account for them. Fourth, we provide an empirical example on BP and WP differences in attentiveness

Complex span versus updating tasks of working memory : the gap is not that deep

How to best measure working memory capacity is an issue of ongoing debate. Besides established complex span tasks, which combine short-term memory demands with generally unrelated secondary tasks, there exists a set of paradigms characterized by continuous and simultaneous updating of several items in working memory, such as the n-back, memory updating, or alpha span tasks. With a latent variable analysis (N = 96) based on content-heterogeneous operationalizations of both task families, the authors found a latent correlation between a complex span factor and an updating factor that was not statistically different from unity (r = .96). Moreover, both factors predicted fluid intelligence (reasoning) equally well. The authors conclude that updating tasks measure working memory equally well as complex span tasks. Processes involved in building, maintaining, and updating arbitrary bindings may constitute the common working memory ability underlying performance on reasoning, complex span, and updating tasks

微細CMOSデバイスの信頼性モデリングの研究

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