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Summary Task 1 - response time and cognitive architecture

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Summary of Task 1 of Methods of Cognitive Neuroscience

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  • March 5, 2024
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  • 2023/2024
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TASK 1: RESPONSE TIME AND COGNITIVE
ARCHITECTURE
REACTION TIMES: A READER 2.0 (SMULDERS, 2020)


HOW IS REACTION TIME MEASURED & INTERPRETED?

REACTION TIME (RT)

 Trials are repeated many times to get reliable mean RT (mRT)
 Operational definition: time between onset of stimulus & the response to that stimulus
 Theoretical definition: minimum of time needed by participant to produce correct
response

WHY MEASURE REACTION TIME?


Reliability &  RT highly sensitive to subtle differences between conditions (effects of few
orderliness milliseconds can be found reliably)
 Results display orderliness  easier to construct models of underlying
info processing


Scale  Ratio level – scale of measuring RT  can be directly interpreted in
properties physical sense
 Meaningful zero-point, linear
 RT measure “real time”, which is variable of interest (e.g., Subtraction
Method, AFM, car driver hits brakes unexpectedly)
 Time as NOT the variable of interest but RT is still used
 Implicit Association Task – stimulus categories associated with left- &
right-hand responses; strength of implicit associations has effect on
RT
 Association strength DOES NOT inherit strong scale properties of
physical time


Measuring  RT paradigms that propose modules that are involved in performing
established specific functions (e.g., memory, perception, attention, decision-
functions making, emotion, language)
 RT models have guided brain researchers “what to look for” when making
brain scans


LIMITATIONS

 RT only reflects end product of processing – cognitive functions themselves are hidden
 Cognitive functions = black box

,  Can only make inferences about what happens between manipulation of input and
observed effect on output
 RT mostly used in simple tasks – easier to study than complex ones
 Complex tasks may lead to more different strategies used by participants 
experimental noise
 Individual differences in how tasks are carried out

THE ANALYSIS OF RT AT 2 LEVELS


First level  Aim: obtain for each participant one / few summary statistics per condition
(mRT, proportion of accurate responses)


Accuracy  Throw out trials from practice blocks & warm-up trials
 Remainder of trials sorted & counted according to condition
 Number of correct responses in each condition counted +
proportion of accurate responses computed


Reaction  Delete practice, warm-up & error trials
time  Inspect distribution of RTs for each participant & condition to
identify outliers
 Long responses – inattentiveness
 Fast responses – respond before (fully) analysing stimulus;
guess after failing to reach a decision
 Removing outliers
 Median – bias if observation number small & different
across conditions
 Trimmed mean – take out e.g., fastest & slowest 10%, then
take mean of the rest
 C standard deviations – first compute mean & SD for each
participant, then delete RTs that deviate more than C (C
= 2.5) SDs from mean
 Fixed criterion – delete all RTs exceeding some value &
compute mean of the rest (could lead to bias & loss of
statistical power)
 Do nothing – should be a conscious choice
 Outliers & cognitive neuroscience
 Removing trials with RT-outliers from neuroimaging data
 Deleting RTs from trials that are rejected from EEG / fMRI
because of method-specific artifacts

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