Response Times Their Role in Inferring Elementary Mental Organization [Hardcover]

Written by a distinguished psychologist, this book is an integrated treatment of the mathematical theory of human response times. Professor Luce provides a comprehensive, well-balanced, and clear review of the experimental data and puts forth the relevance of the hazard function, a novel and important approach he and his colleagues have developed. Since measurements of response times are widely used by experimental psychologists as one approach to distinguishing among theories of intellectual functioning, the conceptual arguments Professor Luce brings to bear on mathematical models of response time are of great relevance to mathematical and experimental psychologists.

1. Representing Response Times as Random Variables
Part I: Detection Paradigms
2. Simple Reaction Times: Basic Data
3. Decomposition into Decision and Residual Latencies
4. Distributions of Simple Decision Latencies
5. Detection of Signals Presented at Irregular Times
Part II: Identification Paradigms
6. Two-Choice Reaction Times: Basic Ideas and Data
7. Mixture Models
8. Stochastic Accumulation of Information in Discrete Time
9. Stochastic Accumulation of Information in Continuous Time
10. Absolute Identification of More than Two Signals
Part III: Matching Paradigms
11. Memory, Scanning, Visual Search, and Same-Difference Designs
12. Processing Stages and Strategies

An extensive and well-presented account...Will certainly remain the basic reference for years to come...The book will be useful to many, whether or not they are theoretically inclined, and will be mandatory reading for anyone dealing with behavioral response times. --Science

Fascinating and essential reading....This book has great richness to offer: to the cognitive scientist, using artificial intelligence and computational techniques as the main vehicle for modelling cognitive and perceptual processes; to the resl“!