Developing tools to measure perceptual speed and visual working memory

Abstract

The lack of accessible, easy-to-use tools for measuring cognitive abilities poses a challenge for researchers, who often need to divert time and resources to develop their own psychometric tests. To address this gap, we developed a web application and made it available to the visualization community. The tool provides validated, literature-based tests to assess Perceptual Speed through comparison tasks and Visual Working Memory through change detection tests. We demonstrate its use in a research study involving 212 participants, successfully measuring both cognitive abilities using our tool. By presenting the results for both cognitive abilities based on the distribution of values collected from all participants, we argue that our tool successfully measured these traits, enabling researchers to easily gather this data without the need for custom development.