Abstract
As retest effects in cognitive ability tests have been investigated by various primary and meta-analytic studies, most studies from this area focus on score gains as a result of retesting. To the best of our knowledge, no meta-analytic study has been reported that provides sizable estimates of response time (RT) reductions due to retesting. This multilevel meta-analysis focuses on mental speed tasks, for which outcome measures often consist of RTs. The size of RT reduction due to retesting in mental speed tasks for up to four test administrations was analyzed based on 36 studies including 49 samples and 212 outcomes for a total sample size of 21,810. Significant RT reductions were found, which increased with the number of test administrations, without reaching a plateau. Larger RT reductions were observed in more complex mental speed tasks compared to simple ones, whereas age and test-retest interval mostly did not moderate the size of the effect. Although a high heterogeneity of effects exists, retest effects were shown to occur for mental speed tasks regarding RT outcomes and should thus be more thoroughly accounted for in applied and research settings.
Highlights
Requesting examinees to complete the same mental speed test more than once is common both in applied and research settings
Retesting with mental speed tasks was found to lead to retest effects when considering response time (RT) as outcome measures
Note that effects have to be interpreted as RT decrease, meaning the more negative the effect size, the higher the retest effect
Summary
Requesting examinees to complete the same mental speed test more than once is common both in applied and research settings. For a clinical example, assessing cognitive decline in a patient may require the administration of one mental speed test at two different points in time. In organizational selection settings, mental speed tests are common tools to assess vocational aptitude [1]. As most applicants prepare for selection settings, retest effects might influence their test results [2]. In randomized controlled trials evaluating intervention effectiveness by pre- and post-measurements, persons are retested with mental speed tests as criterion tasks [3]. Research on cognitive development often has to take into account retest effects, because, in longitudinal studies, retest effects might contaminate the measurement of cognitive abilities [4]
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