The Cognitive Failures Questionnaire 2.0

Abstract

Individual differences in the subjective experience of cognitive failures predict important outcomes, such as accident risk. Over the last four decades, these have been measured via the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (CFQ). However, multiple CFQ items have diminished contemporary relevance and technology-related failures are not represented at all. Further, various attempts to identify multicomponent structures have had problems, which could be due to small numbers of items from which these structures are devised. Here we developed a large set of new items to more fully sample underlying psychological processes, including contemporary instances of cognitive failures, and performed an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) in a sample of adults (Study 1). This identified one dominant factor, which was supported by a subsequent confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) in Study 2. Study 3 replicated the CFA and demonstrated that scores explained variance in objective performance on an attentional control task beyond that explained by the original CFQ. Study 4 demonstrated that scores were associated with focusing, switching, cognitive empathy, affective empathy, and negative affect in ways consistent with the original CFQ. In Study 5, scores demonstrated good test-retest reliability. We offer this 15-item scale as a new and improved measure of cognitive failures (CFQ 2.0).