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Misleading-versus-facilitating task paradigm for assessing effective complexity

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Description

The article distinguishes misleading tasks, which activate mutually incompatible schemes competing for application (e.g., dual-task paradigms and backward span tasks), from facilitating tasks solvable with habitual automatised schemes, such as standard forward span tasks. Misleading situations "can assess effective complexity reliably — whereas facilitating situations, common in learning/memory paradigms and psychometric-intelligence tasks, do not". Effective complexity is indexed by the number of effortfully activated task-relevant schemes required, and these situations show developmental performance discontinuities subtending stages.

Accounts

  • Misleading versus facilitating tasks: misleading situations reliably assess effective complexity of mental attention: The article distinguishes misleading tasks, which activate mutually incompatible schemes competing for application (e.g., dual-task paradigms and backward span tasks), from facilitating tasks solvable with habitual automatised schemes, such as standard forward span tasks. Misleading situations "can assess effective complexity reliably — whereas facilitating situations, common in learning/memory paradigms and psychometric-intelligence tasks, do not". Effective complexity is indexed by the number of effortfully activated task-relevant schemes required, and these situations show developmental performance discontinuities subtending stages. (Arsalidou et al. (2016))

Claims

Key Sources

  • Arsalidou, M. & Pascual-Leone, J. (2016). Constructivist developmental theory is needed in developmental neuroscience. npj Science of Learning 1, 16016. https://doi.org/10.1038/npjscilearn.2016.16
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type research-method
id misleading-versus-facilitating-task-paradigm-for-assessing-effective-complexity
title Misleading-versus-facilitating task paradigm for assessing effective complexity
description The article distinguishes misleading tasks, which activate mutually incompatible schemes competing for application (e.g., dual-task paradigms and backward span tasks), from facilitating tasks solvable with habitual automatised schemes, such as standard forward span tasks.
status review
generated by process:settle-candidates on 2026-10-26
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