Farey trees explain sequential effects in choice response time.

Farey trees explain sequential effects in choice response time.

Annand CT; Fleming SM; Holden JG

Frontiers In Physiology

2021

2021-03-17

Successively measured two-alternative forced-choice response time latencies often display sequential dependencies in their durations. This propensity is a long-recognized empirical puzzle in the decision-making literature e.g., (see Hyman, 1953; Laming, 1969; Schvaneveldt and Chase, 1969; Kornblum, 1973; Kirby, 1976; Treisman and Williams, 1984; Luce, 1986; Cho et al., 2002; Jentzsch and Sommer, 2002; Doshi et al., 2012; Jones et al., 2013; Zhang et al., 2014). Other things equal, successive repeats of targeted stimulus-response relations yield a progressive speeding in response times across successive trials. This tendency is called the repetition effect. On the other hand, sequences of un-targeted or negative responses tend to yield progressive response slowing. Response times for trial-histories that are composed of various permutations of affirmative and negative responses typically fall between these extremes. These core tendencies are generally most acute in simpler tasks with relatively short inter-trial-intervals (ITIs – also called response-stimulus intervals or RSIs), the blank-screen downtime between trials. However, if the task imposes relatively long ITIs (>500ms), then alternating strings of affirmative and negative trials often yield more potent progressive speeding, referred to as the alternation effect (Kirby, 1980).

Journal Article

NEOMED College of Medicine

Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences

Jan to Aug list 2021