Vision for the blind: visual psychophysics and blinded inference for decision models
Open Access
- 8 June 2020
- journal article
- review article
- Published by Springer Science and Business Media LLC in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
- Vol. 27 (5), 882-910
- https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-020-01742-7
Abstract
Evidence accumulation models like the diffusion model are increasingly used by researchers to identify the contributions of sensory and decisional factors to the speed and accuracy of decision-making. Drift rates, decision criteria, and nondecision times estimated from such models provide meaningful estimates of the quality of evidence in the stimulus, the bias and caution in the decision process, and the duration of nondecision processes. Recently, Dutilh et al. (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 26, 1051–1069, 2019) carried out a large-scale, blinded validation study of decision models using the random dot motion (RDM) task. They found that the parameters of the diffusion model were generally well recovered, but there was a pervasive failure of selective influence, such that manipulations of evidence quality, decision bias, and caution also affected estimated nondecision times. This failure casts doubt on the psychometric validity of such estimates. Here we argue that the RDM task has unusual perceptual characteristics that may be better described by a model in which drift and diffusion rates increase over time rather than turn on abruptly. We reanalyze the Dutilh et al. data using models with abrupt and continuous-onset drift and diffusion rates and find that the continuous-onset model provides a better overall fit and more meaningful parameter estimates, which accord with the known psychophysical properties of the RDM task. We argue that further selective influence studies that fail to take into account the visual properties of the evidence entering the decision process are likely to be unproductive.This publication has 97 references indexed in Scilit:
- Atypical Integration of Motion Signals in Autism Spectrum ConditionsPLOS ONE, 2012
- The Optimality of Sensory Processing during the Speed-Accuracy TradeoffJournal of Neuroscience, 2012
- The Cost of Accumulating Evidence in Perceptual Decision MakingJournal of Neuroscience, 2012
- Evaluating the unequal-variance and dual-process explanations of zROC slopes with response time data and the diffusion modelCognitive Psychology, 2012
- Elapsed Decision Time Affects the Weighting of Prior Probability in a Perceptual Decision TaskJournal of Neuroscience, 2011
- Perceptual discrimination in static and dynamic noise: The temporal relation between perceptual encoding and decision making.Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2010
- Decision-making with multiple alternativesNature Neuroscience, 2008
- The Diffusion Decision Model: Theory and Data for Two-Choice Decision TasksNeural Computation, 2008
- Estimating the Dimension of a ModelThe Annals of Statistics, 1978
- A new look at the statistical model identificationIEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 1974