Methodological considerations in cognitive bias research: the next steps

Abstract

Field and Christiansen (2012) comment on the importance of establishing and understanding the internal reliability of measures of substance-related cognitive bias, and suggest potential reasons for the poor reliability of some task variants. We agree that the impact of using stimuli personalized to the participant on the reliability of cognitive bias tasks is worthy of systematic investigation. However, some tasks may still be inherently less reliable than others. Ultimately, this debate should be framed within the wider debate on the validity of laboratory models and methods used to assess real-world phenomena.