title: Measuring slips and lapses when they occur - ambulatory assessment in application to cognitive failures.
abstract: Cognitive failures are lapses in attention, cognition, and actions that everybody experiences in everyday life. Self-reports are mainly used for assessment but those instruments are memory-biased and more related to personality aspects than to actual behavior. Ambulatory assessment is already used for capturing emotions or addictive behavior, but not yet for cognitive failures. The newly developed Questionnaire for Cognitive Failures in Everyday Life (KFA) was applied via mobile phones (electronic KFA) wherein an acoustic signal asked participants (N=91, 60-76 years) 4 times daily to answer 13 questions for 1 week. The new instrument showed satisfying reliability and was compared with a self-report method (Cognitive Failures Questionnaire; Broadbent, Cooper, Fitzgerald, and Parkes, 1982) in terms of correlations with cognitive abilities (working memory capacity, short-term memory, switching ability, and reasoning), personality traits, and demographical aspects. Although further validation is needed, first results are promising and eKFA enriches cognitive failures research.
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Humanities, Department of Psychology I, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, Universitätsplatz 2, 39106 Magdeburg, Germany. Electronic address: stefanie.lange@ovgu.de.
authors.forename: Stefanie
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Lange
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Humanities, Department of Psychology I, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, Universitätsplatz 2, 39106 Magdeburg, Germany. Electronic address: heinz-martin.suess@ovgu.de.
authors.forename: Heinz-Martin
authors.initials: HM
authors.lastname: Süß
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D040421:Cell Phone / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D008875:Middle Aged; D018670:Monitoring, Ambulatory / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods; D011594:Psychometrics / Q000295:instrumentation; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires / Q000592:standards*
keywords: Ambulatory assessment; Cognitive failures; Diary study; Switching ability; Working memory capacity