Unfalsifiability and mutual translatability of major modeling schemes for choice reaction time

Abstract

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 121(1) of Psychological Review (see record 2014-03591-005). The link to supplemental material was missing. All versions of this article have been corrected.] Much current research on speeded choice utilizes models in which the response is triggered by a stochastic process crossing a deterministic threshold. This article focuses on 2 such model classes, 1 based on continuous-time diffusion and the other on linear ballistic accumulation (LBA). Both models assume random variability in growth rates and in other model components across trials. We show that if the form of this variability is unconstrained, the models can exactly match any possible pattern of response probabilities and response time distributions. Thus, the explanatory or predictive content of these models is determined not by their structural assumptions but, rather, by distributional assumptions (e.g., Gaussian distributions) that are traditionally regarded as implementation details. Selective influence assumptions (i.e., which experimental manipulations affect which model parameters) are shown to have no restrictive effect, except for the theoretically questionable assumption that speed-accuracy instructions do not affect growth rates. The 2nd contribution of this article concerns translation of falsifiable models between universal modeling languages. Specifically, we translate the predictions of the diffusion and LBA models (with their parametric and selective influence assumptions intact) into the Grice modeling framework, in which accumulation processes are deterministic and thresholds are random variables. The Grice framework is also known to reproduce any possible pattern of response probabilities and times, and hence it can be used as a common language for comparing models. It is found that only a few simple properties of empirical data are necessary predictions of the diffusion and LBA models.