When is enough, enough?

Cognitive assessments typically involve administering a predefined number of task questions/trials to every participant. This approach is potentially inefficient with respect to psychometric properties. As an example, 20 trials of a task may provide enough information to estimate their average response time for someone with very stable responses. However, for someone else 40 trials may be a better number of trials due to greater variability in their response times. If 30 trials were presented to both people, then this is too many for one person and not enough for another.

The aims of this project are to identify and implement methods that utilize stopping criteria making cognitive assessments more efficient. The outcomes of this project will be incorporated into the 3C platform and an option for end users.

This project involves:

• Understanding/learning about the aims/goals of various cognitive assessments
• Understanding/learing about psychometric properties of cognitive assessments
• Reading the literature to identify methods
• Implementing methods into the 3C platform’s software, or working with someone else to do the implementation
• Testing the tools yourself and on labmates to ensure the methods are working
• Pilot testing on people outside the lab

Reference

Watson AB. QUEST+: A general multidimensional Bayesian adaptive psychometric method. J Vis. 2017;17(3):10.