Abstract
Studies have examined the impact of distraction on basic task performance (e.g., working memory, motor responses), yet research is lacking regarding its impact in the domain of think-aloud cognitive assessment, where the threat to assessment validity is high. The Articulated Thoughts in Simulated Situations think-aloud cognitive assessment paradigm was employed to address this issue. Participants listened to scenarios under three conditions (i.e., while answering trivia questions, playing a visual puzzle game, or with no experimental distractor). Their articulated thoughts were then content-analyzed both by the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program and by content analysis of emotion and cognitive processes conducted by trained coders. Distraction did not impact indices of emotion but did affect cognitive processes. Specifically, with the LIWC system, the trivia questions distraction condition resulted in significantly higher proportions of insight and causal words, and higher frequencies of non-fluencies (e.g., “uh” or “umm”) and filler words (e.g., “like” or “you know”). Coder-rated content analysis found more disengagement and more misunderstanding particularly in the trivia questions distraction condition. A better understanding of how distraction disrupts the amount and type of cognitive engagement holds important implications for future studies employing cognitive assessment methods.
Highlights
Given the limited capacity of human cognition, engaging in any non-automatic task requires that attention be selectively focused on relevant information while irrelevant information is ignored
TRAINED HUMAN CONTENT ANALYSIS Three undergraduate research assistants were trained on a total of five coding categories, including two emotional codes: (1) anger, hostility, and aggression; and (2) distress/anxiety/worry; and three distraction-specific codes: (3) overt distraction; (4) misunderstanding, and (5) disengagement
While the impact of distraction on task performance has been well studied, its impact on cognitive assessment is less welldocumented, regarding think-aloud assessment, and emotion-provoking stimuli. This empirical neglect is surprising given that task disengagement has often been raised by critics as a threat to assessment validity, though primarily directed toward think-aloud methods
Summary
Given the limited capacity of human cognition, engaging in any non-automatic task (including any type of cognitive-affective assessment) requires that attention be selectively focused on relevant information while irrelevant information is ignored. Acknowledging that thoughts are central to intra and interpersonal functioning as well as to psychopathology, psychologists have used a variety of questionnaires and assessment methods to capture cognitions and emotions. One such cognitive-emotional assessment approach is the Articulated Thoughts in Simulated Situations (ATSS) experimental paradigm. The ATSS paradigm (Davison et al, 1983) was introduced as a way to access complex cognition and emotion in experimenter-controlled situations of considerable complexity This think-aloud paradigm involves the research participant being asked to imagine that he/she is part of an audio-recorded situation and to verbalize his/her thoughts and emotional reactions periodically during pauses in the vignette. The ATSS has been utilized in diverse areas of inquiry such as anger and aggression, interpersonal bias, psychotherapy process, eating disorders, alcohol use, maintenance of smoking cessation, depression, and social anxiety (for further detail, see reviews by Davison et al, 1997; Zanov and Davison, 2010)
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