Assessing Cognitive Failures

Abstract

This special issue, entitled “Assessing Cognitive Failures,” includes articles based on presentations at the 9th European Conference on Psychological Assessment held in Thessaloniki, Greece, 3–6 May 2007. The topic of the special issue was selected because, despite the fact that cognitive failures are frequently experienced in everyday life by people of all ages, they have not attracted much research interest. Yet, cognitive failures are as important as effective cognitive functioning, and the implications for theory (i.e., conceptualization of cognitive failures and the mechanism that underlies them), assessment, and psychological practice are very significant. In this respect, there are two aspects of cognitive failures for which assessment is needed: (a) assessment of the cognitive processes that are involved in cognitive failures, and (b) assessment of the awareness people have of their cognitive failure(s). The former allows predictions about processes whose functioning may give rise to cognitive failures, whereas the latter allows the identification of individual differences in the propensity for cognitive failures and predictions about factors related to the experience of cognitive failure and the control processes involved. Cognitive failures were originally conceptualized by Reason and Mycielska (1982) as absent-mindedness, that is, mistakes or errors people make because of slips of attention or memory failure. This implies that cognitive failures are not necessarily symptoms of a pathology of the underlying cognitive processes but rather by-products of normal functioning of cognitive processes. Cognitive failures have been defined as cognitively-based mistakes on tasks that, ordinarily, the average person can accomplish (Broadbent, Cooper, Fitzgerald, & Parkes, 1982; Wallace, Kass, & Stanny, 2002). Their origin has been traced to memory problems (Norman, 1981), attention problems (Robertson, Manly, Andrade, Baddeley, & Yiend, 1997), errors in the implementation of intentions (Norman, 1981), or errors caused by distractions (Pollina, Greene, Tunick, & Puckett, 1992). Alternative theoretical schemes have broadened the classification to involve even clumsiness and problems in social interactions (Mathews, Cole, & Craig, 1990) or problems in processing information (Larsson, Alderton, Neideffer, & Underhill, 1997). In all these cases the problem seems to lie in processes that failed to fully function and control behavior. From this point of view, cognitive failures are related to executive functions and, particularly, to attention, inhibitory control, and working memory.