Does cognitive reflection predict attentional control in visual tasks?

The cognitive reflection test (CRT) measures the ability to suppress an intuitive, but incorrect, answer that easily comes to mind. The relationship between the CRT and different cognitive biases has been widely studied. However, whether cognitive reflection is related to attentional control is less well studied. The aim of this paper is to investigate whether the inhibitory component of the CRT, measured by the number of non-intuitive answers of the CRT (Inhibitory Control Score), is related to the control of visual attention in visual tasks that involve overriding a bias in what to attend: an anti-saccade task and a visual search task. To test this possibility, we analyzed whether the CRT-Inhibitory Control Score (CRT-ICS) predicted attention allocation in each task. We compared the relationship between the CRT-ICS to two other potential predictors of attentional control: numeracy and visual working memory (VWM). Participants who scored lower on the CRT-ICS made more errors in the “look-away” trials in the anti-saccade task. Participants who scored higher on the CRT-ICS looked more often towards more informative color subsets in the visual search task. However, when controlling for numeracy and visual working memory, CRT-ICS scores were only related to the control of visual attention in the anti-saccade task.