Seth Roberts used a balance test to measure cognitive functioning to help determine whether various cognition-enhancing supplements were working. He would stand on a small platform and measure the time before he fell off, repeated like 5 times. One of his readers came up with another measure—arithmetic drills. A sheet full of single-digit addition or multiplication problems. The measure, of course, is time to completion.
I have a version of Tetris I think might be useful towards this end. In my version of the game, the speed increases when you clear lines and decreases when you stack them up, (and the lines shift down when you fill up the well so there’s no game over,) so your average speed can indicate the level of attention you can sustain. If anyone’s interested I can publish it. (Developed on Windows, might possibly work on Linux, or even OSX.) OTOH, I’m not completely sure how well this measure works, because there seems to be a significant degree of variation within a single, short playing session. A good test would have little random variation in the results of immediately repeated tests. You’d probably want to do some experiments to see how long the session would have to be to reach a suitably low variation.
The problem with all of the suggestions in the thread so far is that even if they correlate well with one’s mental performance in general, they correlate much less well with individual tasks. Particular tests might be more correlated to particular tasks than others, but unless you know how correlated your test and task are, you won’t be able to draw any good conclusions. Ideally one would have some sort of factor analysis that one could categorize tests and tasks in, so you could pick the best matching test for your intended task.
I’d wager the correlation between performance of different tasks in various mental states for a person over a few weeks or months (excluding skill improvements) is probably around .3 - .6.
Seth Roberts used a balance test to measure cognitive functioning to help determine whether various cognition-enhancing supplements were working. He would stand on a small platform and measure the time before he fell off, repeated like 5 times. One of his readers came up with another measure—arithmetic drills. A sheet full of single-digit addition or multiplication problems. The measure, of course, is time to completion.
I have a version of Tetris I think might be useful towards this end. In my version of the game, the speed increases when you clear lines and decreases when you stack them up, (and the lines shift down when you fill up the well so there’s no game over,) so your average speed can indicate the level of attention you can sustain. If anyone’s interested I can publish it. (Developed on Windows, might possibly work on Linux, or even OSX.) OTOH, I’m not completely sure how well this measure works, because there seems to be a significant degree of variation within a single, short playing session. A good test would have little random variation in the results of immediately repeated tests. You’d probably want to do some experiments to see how long the session would have to be to reach a suitably low variation.
The problem with all of the suggestions in the thread so far is that even if they correlate well with one’s mental performance in general, they correlate much less well with individual tasks. Particular tests might be more correlated to particular tasks than others, but unless you know how correlated your test and task are, you won’t be able to draw any good conclusions. Ideally one would have some sort of factor analysis that one could categorize tests and tasks in, so you could pick the best matching test for your intended task.
I’d wager the correlation between performance of different tasks in various mental states for a person over a few weeks or months (excluding skill improvements) is probably around .3 - .6.