TY - JOUR
T1 - Individual differences on speeded cognitive tasks
T2 - Comment on Chen, Hale, and Myerson (2007)
AU - Leite, Fábio P.
AU - Ratcliff, Roger
AU - White, Corey N.
N1 - Copyright:
Copyright 2018 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2007/10
Y1 - 2007/10
N2 - Chen, Hale, and Myerson (2007) recently reported a test of the difference engine model (Myerson, Hale, Zheng, Jenkins, & Widaman, 2003). This test evaluated whether the standard deviation (SD) is proportional to the amount of processing - that is, mean reaction time (RT) - in a speeded cognitive task. We show that this evaluation is not a test of the model because its finding is a consequence of relationships in the data. We argue any model structure that produces increasing values of RT as a function of difficulty, with different slopes for different individuals, necessarily produces a correlation between SD and mean RT. We illustrate this with a different model structure - that is, the diffusion model proposed by Ratcliff (1978) - showing that it produces a fan out between fast- and slow-group means and produces the correlation between SD and mean RT that matches the empirical result.
AB - Chen, Hale, and Myerson (2007) recently reported a test of the difference engine model (Myerson, Hale, Zheng, Jenkins, & Widaman, 2003). This test evaluated whether the standard deviation (SD) is proportional to the amount of processing - that is, mean reaction time (RT) - in a speeded cognitive task. We show that this evaluation is not a test of the model because its finding is a consequence of relationships in the data. We argue any model structure that produces increasing values of RT as a function of difficulty, with different slopes for different individuals, necessarily produces a correlation between SD and mean RT. We illustrate this with a different model structure - that is, the diffusion model proposed by Ratcliff (1978) - showing that it produces a fan out between fast- and slow-group means and produces the correlation between SD and mean RT that matches the empirical result.
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U2 - 10.3758/BF03194136
DO - 10.3758/BF03194136
M3 - Comment/debate
C2 - 18087974
AN - SCOPUS:37349064938
VL - 14
SP - 1007
EP - 1009
JO - Psychonomic Bulletin and Review
JF - Psychonomic Bulletin and Review
SN - 1069-9384
IS - 5
ER -