Departures from optimal stopping in an anagram task (Q753735)

To demonstrate the feasibility of defining impulsiveness (or its opposite, overcautiousness) as a departure from an optimum amount of time, we gave subjects a specified number of points (e.g., 100) for a correct answer to an anagram problem, a specified cost per second for working on each problem (e.g., 4 points), and a specified probability that each problem was insoluble (e.g., 0.25). At any point in time after each problem was presented, the subject could give up working on it. To find the optimum stopping point, we fit a curve representing the probability of solving an as-yet-unsolved, soluble problem as a function of time spent working on the problem. From this curve, under certain assumptions, we could calculate (for each condition) each subject's optimum stopping point, the time at which the subject should give up.