A Solution to The Reliability Paradox for Decision-Conflict Tasks

Standard, well-established cognitive tasks that produce reliable effects in group comparisons also lead to unreliable measurement when assessing individual differences. This “reliability paradox” has been demonstrated in decision-conflict tasks such as the Simon, Flanker, and Stroop tasks, which measure inhibitory capacity. We aimed to address this phenomenon by implementing gamified tasks and combined versions of the standard tests. A series of experiments concluded that a Flanker task and a combined Simon and Stroop task produced reliable estimates of individual differences in under 100 trials per task. In comparison to archival Flanker, Simon, and Stroop data, these two task variations demonstrated both efficient and reliable measurement. Having both theoretical and applied implications regarding how the cognitive testing of individual differences is carried out, our novel approach offers improved estimation of such differences in a way that is both practical and easily implemented.