Abstract
The development of brief, reliable and valid self-report measures of cognitive abilities would facilitate research in areas including cognitive ageing. This is due to both practical and economic limitations of formal cognitive testing procedures. This study examined the reliability and validity of the newly developed Self-Report Measure of Cognitive Abilities (SRMCA; Jacobs & Roodenburg, 2014); a multi-item self-report tool designed to assess cognitive function in the ability areas of fluid reasoning (Gf), comprehension-knowledge (Gc) and visual processing (Gv). Participants were (n = 93) cognitively healthy older adults aged between 52 and 82 years who completed the SRMCA, the Big Five Inventory and a battery of cognitive tasks. Results revealed adequate reliability for the SRMCA and convergent validity for the Gc domain but not for Gf or Gv. Moreover, significant personality bias was evident with Extraversion (positively), Openness to Experience (positively) and Neuroticism (negatively) predicting SRMCA responses independently of actual cognitive performance. Thus, although the SRMCA appears to be reliable in older adults, personality was a stronger predictor of self-estimated cognitive abilities than actual cognitive performance, questioning the utility of this tool as a subjective measure of cognitive ability.
Highlights
Cognitive function is one of the most widely studied topics in Psychology and interest in human intellectual function predates the modern tests with which it is measured
Item means were comparable across time points and participants mostly rated the various cognitive activities questioned in the Self-Report Measure of Cognitive Abilities (SRMCA) items as “easy”
We examined the factor structure of the SRMCA, the reliability of SRMCA domains over successive measurements, the relationships between the SRMCA domains and test-based cognitive performance and the influence of the Big Five personality traits on participants’ responses
Summary
Cognitive function is one of the most widely studied topics in Psychology and interest in human intellectual function predates the modern tests with which it is measured. The usual approach to assess cognitive function involves measuring the performance of individuals using a variety of variables—speed and accuracy, for example—on a range of psychometric tests. This traditional approach can be time consuming and inconvenient for participants and is accompanied by high economic costs relating to test design, administration and analysis [4]. These assessments are typically undertaken one-on-one and require highly trained staff, placing further limitations on their accessibility.
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