An Open-Source Cognitive Test Battery to Assess Human Attention and Memory

Maxime Adolphe; Masataka Sawayama; Denis Maurel; Alexandra Delmas; Pierre-Yves Oudeyer; Hélène Sauzéon

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2022.880375

An Open-Source Cognitive Test Battery to Assess Human Attention and Memory

Front Psychol. 2022 Jun 10:13:880375. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.880375. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Maxime Adolphe^{1

2

3}, Masataka Sawayama¹, Denis Maurel², Alexandra Delmas², Pierre-Yves Oudeyer^{1

4}, Hélène Sauzéon^{1

5}

Affiliations

¹ Flowers Team, Inria, Bordeaux, France.
² Research and Development Team, Onepoint, Bordeaux, France.
³ Department of Cognitive Sciences and Ergonomics, Université de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France.
⁴ Microsoft Research Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada.
⁵ ACTIVE Team, Université de Bordeaux, INSERM, BPH, U1219, Bordeaux, France.

Abstract

Cognitive test batteries are widely used in diverse research fields, such as cognitive training, cognitive disorder assessment, or brain mechanism understanding. Although they need flexibility according to their usage objectives, most test batteries are not available as open-source software and are not be tuned by researchers in detail. The present study introduces an open-source cognitive test battery to assess attention and memory, using a javascript library, p5.js. Because of the ubiquitous nature of dynamic attention in our daily lives, it is crucial to have tools for its assessment or training. For that purpose, our test battery includes seven cognitive tasks (multiple-objects tracking, enumeration, go/no-go, load-induced blindness, task-switching, working memory, and memorability), common in cognitive science literature. By using the test battery, we conducted an online experiment to collect the benchmark data. Results conducted on 2 separate days showed the high cross-day reliability. Specifically, the task performance did not largely change with the different days. Besides, our test battery captures diverse individual differences and can evaluate them based on the cognitive factors extracted from latent factor analysis. Since we share our source code as open-source software, users can expand and manipulate experimental conditions flexibly. Our test battery is also flexible in terms of the experimental environment, i.e., it is possible to experiment either online or in a laboratory environment.

Keywords: enumeration; go/no-go decision; load induced blindness; memorability; multiple object tracking (MOT); online experiment; task-switching; working memory.