Neuroticism and Speed-Accuracy Tradeoff in Self-Paced Speeded Mental Addition and Comparison

Abstract

Previous research suggests a relationship between neuroticism (N) and the speed-accuracy tradeoff in speeded performance: High-N individuals were observed performing less efficiently than low-N individuals and compensatorily overemphasizing response speed at the expense of accuracy. This study examined N-related performance differences in the serial mental addition and comparison task (SMACT) in 99 individuals, comparing several performance measures (i.e., response speed, accuracy, and variability), retest reliability, and practice effects. N was negatively correlated with mean reaction time but positively correlated with error percentage, indicating that high-N individuals tended to be faster but less accurate in their performance than low-N individuals. The strengthening of the relationship after practice demonstrated the reliability of the findings. There was, however, no relationship between N and distractibility (assessed via measures of reaction time variability). Our main findings are in line with the processing efficiency theory, extending the relationship between N and working style to sustained self-paced speeded mental addition.

Individual differences in response speed and accuracy are associated to specific brain activities of two interacting systems

“…Spontaneous (idiosyncratic) employment of speed and accuracy strategies reflects, at least in part, a trait disposition (Ashcraft and Faust, 1994; Ashcraft and Kirk, 2001; Szymura and Wodniecka, 2003; Flehmig et al, 2010); thus, we thought that speed or accuracy behaviors could be better unfolded in their habitual trend. A limit of the approaches based on instructions manipulation is the individual differences in copying with the instructions themselves; for example, a spontaneously fast subject can easily behave more slowly, while a slow subject may have trouble to speed up.…”

“…A key methodological difference with previous studies is that we did not force subjects to emphasize speed or accuracy, rather we sought to separately describe the neural processes subserving speed or accuracy on the basis of the subjects’ spontaneous behavioral tendency; thus, subjects were assigned a posteriori to each group (high or low accuracy; fast or slow speed) based on the observed performance. Spontaneous (idiosyncratic) employment of speed and accuracy strategies reflects, at least in part, a trait disposition (Ashcraft and Faust, 1994 ; Ashcraft and Kirk, 2001 ; Szymura and Wodniecka, 2003 ; Flehmig et al, 2010 ); thus, we thought that speed or accuracy behaviors could be better unfolded in their habitual trend. A limit of the approaches based on instructions manipulation is the individual differences in copying with the instructions themselves; for example, a spontaneously fast subject can easily behave more slowly, while a slow subject may have trouble to speed up.…”

Interindividual differences in cognitive flexibility: Influence of gray-matter volume, functional connectivity and trait impulsivity

“…Indeed, correlations have been found between different personality dimensions (Flehmig et al 2010;Aiken-Morgan et al 2012;Soubelet and Salthouse 2011;Sutin et al 2011) and neuropsychological measures of executive functioning. Previous personality research, however, has strongly focused on the Big Five, while other personality factors have been rather neglected.…”

Phone Conversation while Processing Information: Chronometric Analysis of Load Effects in Everyday-media Multitasking

“…For each of the experimental conditions, we computed the reaction time mean (RTM) to index average response speed and the RTCV to index relative response-speed variability, according to the suggestion of Flehmig et al (2007) and Flehmig et al (2010) , and according to our previous use of this method. RTCV is obtained by computing the standard deviation of the RTs (separately for each individual and experimental condition) divided by the individual mean of RTs (for each individual and experimental conditions).…”