Reliability in developmental research is important to consider not only for infant research but also for researchers who wish to study individual differences at all ages. Forced-choice behavioural tasks are popular in cognitive developmental research with preschoolers and young school-age children because of their ease of administration and interpretation; however, the fact that guessing correctly is possible introduces noise that reduces reliability. An informal simulation is presented to illustrate this issue. Researchers wishing to investigate individual differences are encouraged to consider the reliability of the tasks they choose and not reflexively rely on familiar tasks that may be poorly suited to the study of true individual differences.

中文翻译：

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可靠的发育研究：不仅适用于婴儿期

发育研究的可靠性不仅对于婴儿研究而且对于希望研究所有年龄段个体差异的研究人员来说都很重要。强制选择行为任务在学龄前儿童和学龄儿童的认知发展研究中很受欢迎，因为它们易于管理和解释；但是，可以正确猜测的事实会引入降低可靠性的噪声。提出了一个非正式的模拟来说明这个问题。鼓励希望调查个体差异的研究人员考虑他们选择的任务的可靠性，而不是条件反射地依赖可能不适合研究真正个体差异的熟悉任务。