Mouse Tracking Measures Reveal Cognitive Conflicts Better than Response Time and Accuracy Measures

Abstract

Mouse-tracking is said to provide a real-time record of decision making in a conflict situation (Stillman, Shen, & Ferguson, 2018); yet precise benefit of this method is unknown. Using two versions of the attention network task (ANT-R) (Fan et al., 2009), we investigated the extent to which mouse movement measures capture cognitive conflicts created in flanker and Simon tasks. The movement measures collected in the augmented ANT-R (mouse movement condition) were responsive to both flanker and Simon incongruency but response time and accuracy measures in the regular ANT-R (key-press condition) were responsive primarily to flanker incongruency only. The mouse movement measures were also sensitive to interaction effects involving incongruency and gender, trial order and congruency sequence, while response time and accuracy in the regular ANT-R (key-press condition) were mostly insensitive to these interactions. These results suggest that mouse movement measures are more perceptive to cognitive conflicts.

Publication
In A.K. Goel, C.M. Seifert, & C. Freksa (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 3150-3156)