Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (CFQ64)
What It Measures
The Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (CFQ) asks about the small mistakes everyone makes — walking into a room and forgetting why, losing the thread of a conversation, dropping things, missing a road sign. It measures how often a person experiences these lapses, not whether their cognition is objectively impaired.
Twenty-five items cover slips in three areas the authors intended: perception, memory, and motor action. Each is rated from never to very often, and items sum to a total from 0 to 100. Scores turn out to be fairly stable over time, which suggests the CFQ reflects a durable tendency rather than a bad week. Higher scores have been linked to slower performance on attention tasks and to accident proneness at work and on the road.
Additional Notes
Learn More: It measures subjective experience, not objective performance, and is not a substitute for cognitive testing.