Situational Judgment Tests: An Overview of Development Practices and Psychometric Characteristics

Situational judgment tests (SJTs) are popular assessment methods often used for personnel selection and promotion. SJTs present problem scenarios to examinees, who then evaluate each response option for addressing the issue described in the scenario. As guidance for practitioners and researchers alike, this paper provides experience- and evidence-based best practices for developing SJTs: writing scenarios and response options, creating response instructions, and selecting a response format. This review describes scoring options, including key stretching and within-person standardization. The authors also describe research on psychometric issues that affect SJTs, including reliability, validity, group differences, presentation modes, faking, and coaching.

Anomalous visual experience is linked to perceptual uncertainty and visual imagery vividness

An imbalance between top-down and bottom-up processing on perception (specifically, over-reliance on top-down processing) can lead to anomalous perception, such as illusions. One factor that may be involved in anomalous perception is visual mental imagery, which is the experience of “seeing” with the mind’s eye. There are vast individual differences in self-reported imagery vividness, and more vivid imagery is linked to a more sensory-like experience. We therefore hypothesized that susceptibility to anomalous perception is linked to individual imagery vividness. To investigate this, we adopted a paradigm that is known to elicit the perception of faces in pure visual noise. In four experiments, we explored how imagery vividness contributes to this experience under different response instructions and environments. We found strong evidence that people with more vivid imagery were more likely to see faces in the noise, although removing suggestive instructions weakened this relationship. Analyses from the first two experiments led us to explore confidence as another factor in pareidolia proneness. We therefore modulated environment noise and added a confidence rating in a novel design. We found strong evidence that pareidolia proneness is correlated with uncertainty about real percepts. Decreasing perceptual ambiguity abolished the relationship between pareidolia proneness and both imagery vividness and confidence. The results cannot be explained by incidental face-like patterns in the noise, individual variations in response bias, perceptual sensitivity, subjective perceptual thresholds, viewing distance, testing environments, motivation, gender, or prosopagnosia. This indicates a critical role of mental imagery vividness and perceptual uncertainty in anomalous perceptual experience.

Mobile phone use among Medical Reserve Corps coordinators and volunteers: An exploratory study

Objective: To better understand how mobile phones can be used during emergency response, this study identifies a) current mobile phone use among Medical Reserve Corps (MRC) volunteers and coordinators in their daily lives and during response; b) challenges for mobile phone use during response; and c) areas for capacity building. Design: In 2012, 459 MRC volunteers and coordinators responded to a 35-question survey conducted online through SurveyMonkey. Respondents were asked how they use their mobile phones in their daily lives and during response, and how they would like to use them during response. Frequencies were calculated using SurveyMonkey and Excel.Main outcome measures: Respondents reported frequent and varied mobile phone use in their daily lives, with 99 percent of respondents owning a phone, 82 percent texting, and 87 percent of smartphone owners using apps. Although 80 percent of respondents who had been deployed used mobile phones during response, use of sophisticated mobile phone features was low; only 10 percent accessed emergency preparedness apps and 23 percent browsed the Internet for emergency response information. Respondents indicated a desire to use more features during response, such as emergency preparedness apps (72 percent) and e-mail to send or receive response instructions (80 percent). Conclusion: Results indicate that given access to mobile technology and training, emergency responders would like to increase their mobile phone use during response. Implications of these findings show a need for organizations to improve their support of mobile phone use.

The Multinomial Model of Prospective Memory

The objective of this research was to provide additional experimental validation of the multinomial processing tree (MPT) model of event-based prospective memory ( Smith & Bayen, 2004 ). In particular, the parameters that measure trial-type detection in the ongoing task were examined. In three experiments with different response instructions, event-based prospective memory tasks were embedded in ongoing color-matching tasks. The results support the validity of the MPT model, that is, manipulations of ongoing-task difficulty affected the ongoing-task parameters of the MPT model, while leaving the estimates for the prospective and the retrospective components of prospective memory unaffected.