Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Researchers have long been interested in using laboratory mea-sures of cognitive control to predict a person’s cognitive con-trol/self control success outside the lab. We used a computa-tional approach to identify which lab-based performance mea-sures provide the most valid individual difference measuresof one’s ability and/or motivation to exert cognitive control.We simulated performance across an array of cognitive controltasks, and estimated the degree to which different performancemetrics (e.g., congruency effects, conflict adaptation, and de-mand avoidance) could theoretically provide valid estimatesof processes underlying control allocation. By performing di-mension reduction on these performance metrics, we furtherrevealed latent dimensions that can index separate mechanismsof control-demanding behavior. Our results suggest that indi-vidual differences in measures of cognitive control can orig-inate from multiple factors, several of which are unrelated tocapacity for cognitive control. We conclude by discussing im-plications of these analyses for assessing individual differencesin cognitive control phenomena.