Stochastic dynamic models of response time and accuracy: A foundation primer (Q1584805)

Stochastic accumulation processes are important elements of many models in sensory and cognitive psychology, their role being to provide a theoretical foundation from which response time and accuracy predictions may be derived. These processes represent an essential link between observed performance, which is inherently probabilistic, and the underlying psychological mechanisms from which it arises. The accumulation processes that have been proposed have been of two main kinds. The first, exemplified by SDT, assumes that the sampling time is determined by factors external to the information sample; the second, exemplified by the large and varied class of sequential sampling models, assumes that the sampling time is determined by the statistical properties of the sample itself. These two sorts of model lead, respectively, to the study of the free transition distribution of the unbounded accumulation process and to the study of its first passage time statistics. This article has investigated the foundations of a class of stochastic accumulation models that can be formulated as Markov processes in continuous time and continuous state space. The dynamics of information accrual in these models are represented by first-order, linear SDEs, whose solutions are diffusion processes. In general, the assumptions embodied in the defining SDEs of such models result in processes that are both temporally and spatially inhomogeneous. This article provides a characterization of accumulation processes that either are Gaussian or can be made Gaussian by transformation of the time scale and state space. Methods are described for obtaining the time-dependent distribution of the unbounded accumulation process and for obtaining the first passage lime distributions through either one or two absorbing barriers, which may themselves vary with time. For processes in one dimension, it is possible to give a fairly complete characterization both of the free transition distribution of the process and of its first passage lime distribution. For processes in more than one dimension, a fairly complete characterization of the unbounded accumulation process is again possible, but the first passage time problems that arise in relation to processes of this kind are far less tractable. In important special cases, multidimensional first passage time problems can be reduced to equivalent problems in a single dimension. The conditions under which such a reduction is possible and the kinds of psychological processes that might be represented by models of this kind are described.