Beyond accuracy: extracting reaction-time biomarkers of sustained attention and cognitive flexibility from the UCancellation task
Abstract
Cancellation tasks are widely used measures of attention but are conventionally scored by metrics such as mean accuracy or concentration scores, disregarding the temporal structure of responding. Here, we derive two reaction-time (RT) biomarkers from our tablet-based UCancellation task in 388 young adults: intra-individual RT variability (RTV), a marker of sustained attention, and switch cost, an index of cognitive flexibility from transitions between two different task's target categories. Because consecutive targets are separated by a variable number of scanned distractors, both are confounded by search effort, which we remove with a scanning-load (p) correction framework. RTV behaved as a scored individual-difference measure: correction improved reliability and convergent validity against TOVA low-frequency RTV (n = 373), and a cross-target composite was the most reliable index. Switch cost behaved as a within-task phenomenon whose sign reversed with load—large and positive when targets were adjacent, reversing as scanning load increased—consistent with inhibition of return. Together, these metrics show that RT structure within a brief cancellation task carries attentional information that standard metrics alone does not capture.
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BibTeX
@misc{penaloza2026beyond,
title = {{Beyond accuracy: extracting reaction-time biomarkers of sustained attention and cognitive flexibility from the UCancellation task}},
author = {Boris Penaloza and Elnaz Vafaei and Anja Pahor and Susanne M. Jaeggi and Aaron Seitz},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/jndkg_v2},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/jndkg_v2/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Beyond accuracy: extracting reaction-time biomarkers of sustained attention and cognitive flexibility from the UCancellation task
AU - Boris Penaloza
AU - Elnaz Vafaei
AU - Anja Pahor
AU - Susanne M. Jaeggi
AU - Aaron Seitz
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/30
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/jndkg_v2
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/jndkg_v2/
AB - Cancellation tasks are widely used measures of attention but are conventionally scored by metrics such as mean accuracy or concentration scores, disregarding the temporal structure of responding. Here, we derive two reaction-time (RT) biomarkers from our tablet-based UCancellation task in 388 young adults: intra-individual RT variability (RTV), a marker of sustained attention, and switch cost, an index of cognitive flexibility from transitions between two different task's target categories. Because consecutive targets are separated by a variable number of scanned distractors, both are confounded by search effort, which we remove with a scanning-load (p) correction framework. RTV behaved as a scored individual-difference measure: correction improved reliability and convergent validity against TOVA low-frequency RTV (n = 373), and a cross-target composite was the most reliable index. Switch cost behaved as a within-task phenomenon whose sign reversed with load—large and positive when targets were adjacent, reversing as scanning load increased—consistent with inhibition of return. Together, these metrics show that RT structure within a brief cancellation task carries attentional information that standard metrics alone does not capture.
ER -