Establishing parallel and scalar measures of executive and semantic demand: an online norming study of matched, cross-domain judgement tasks
- 1University of Cambridge
Abstract
Task demand has a long-standing history in experimental psychology, with numerous investigations of the capacity of different systems and processes under varying cognitive load. Whilst demand is a broadly used term in the literature, it is limited by a lack of cross-domain operationalisation, and thus can be a confound in many inter-domain investigations. To address this, we generated and validated two large-scale, open-source, widely applicable stimuli sets that: (i) can probe a wide, continuous range of objective behaviourally-measured processing demand, and (ii) can be directly matched across two highly contrastive cognitive domains (semantic and visuospatial processing). We normed these tasks in a large, online cohort of healthy adults, enabling future studies to utilise and benefit from reliable baseline measures of demand. Using a matching algorithm that takes into account both speed and accuracy, we then closely paired each semantic judgement trial with a trial of comparable difficulty from the corresponding visuospatial task to produce a cross domain matched set of over 400 items. Finally, we analysed the psycholinguistic and perceptual properties of these stimuli to explore some of the underlying factors driving demand.
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BibTeX
@misc{bozianu2026establishing,
title = {{Establishing parallel and scalar measures of executive and semantic demand: an online norming study of matched, cross-domain judgement tasks}},
author = {G. Bozianu and A. Woolgar and M. Lambon Ralph and A. Halai},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.64898/2026.09.24.753760},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.24.753760v1},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Establishing parallel and scalar measures of executive and semantic demand: an online norming study of matched, cross-domain judgement tasks
AU - G. Bozianu
AU - A. Woolgar
AU - M. Lambon Ralph
AU - A. Halai
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/24
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.09.24.753760
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.24.753760v1
AB - Task demand has a long-standing history in experimental psychology, with numerous investigations of the capacity of different systems and processes under varying cognitive load. Whilst demand is a broadly used term in the literature, it is limited by a lack of cross-domain operationalisation, and thus can be a confound in many inter-domain investigations. To address this, we generated and validated two large-scale, open-source, widely applicable stimuli sets that: (i) can probe a wide, continuous range of objective behaviourally-measured processing demand, and (ii) can be directly matched across two highly contrastive cognitive domains (semantic and visuospatial processing). We normed these tasks in a large, online cohort of healthy adults, enabling future studies to utilise and benefit from reliable baseline measures of demand. Using a matching algorithm that takes into account both speed and accuracy, we then closely paired each semantic judgement trial with a trial of comparable difficulty from the corresponding visuospatial task to produce a cross domain matched set of over 400 items. Finally, we analysed the psycholinguistic and perceptual properties of these stimuli to explore some of the underlying factors driving demand.
ER -