Psychometrics of the continuous mind: Measuring cognitive sub-processes via mouse tracking

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psychometrics
• Computational Neuroscience

Background:

• Traditional psychological measurements rely on discrete responses, overlooking valuable process information.
• Mouse tracking offers a continuous view of cognitive processes but often fails to yield dynamic, psychometrically valid markers.
• Extracting dynamic markers is crucial for understanding the sub-processes involved in decision-making and response generation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce and evaluate time-continuous multiple regression (TCMR) for extracting dynamic markers from mouse-tracking data.
• To assess the psychometric properties, specifically reliability, of these dynamic markers.
• To apply these dynamic measures to identify differences in cognitive sub-processes between groups in response conflict tasks.

Main Methods:

• Utilized time-continuous multiple regression (TCMR) to analyze mouse-tracking data.
• Extracted dynamic markers reflecting the timing, duration, and influence strength of cognitive sub-processes.
• Evaluated the reliability of the extracted dynamic measures.
• Applied TCMR to compare sub-processes in Simon and flanker tasks.

Main Results:

• TCMR successfully extracted dynamic markers from mouse movements.
• The dynamic measures demonstrated good reliability, suitable for individual differences research.
• Distinct temporal patterns were identified in response conflict resolution, aligning with theoretical predictions for Simon and flanker tasks.

Conclusions:

• Mouse movement data, analyzed with TCMR, can yield psychometrically valid dynamic measures of psychological properties.
• These dynamic measures offer insights into individual and situational differences in cognitive processes.
• A MATLAB toolbox is available to facilitate these analyses.