What are the shapes of response time distributions in visual search?
Name
Torralba_What are the shapes.pdf
Size
2.48 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
7e0b4eeb347b048615e3fef88182be88
Author(s)
Palmer, Evan M.
Horowitz, Todd S.
Torralba, Antonio
Date Issued
February 2011
Journal
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance
Publisher
American Psychological Association (APA)
Citation
Palmer, Evan M. et al. “What Are the Shapes of Response Time Distributions in Visual Search?” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 37.1 (2011): 58–71.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Many visual search experiments measure response time (RT) as their primary dependent variable. Analyses typically focus on mean (or median) RT. However, given enough data, the RT distribution can be a rich source of information. For this paper, we collected about 500 trials per cell per observer for both target-present and target-absent displays in each of three classic search tasks: feature search, with the target defined by color; conjunction search, with the target defined by both color and orientation; and spatial configuration search for a 2 among distractor 5s. This large data set allows us to characterize the RT distributions in detail. We present the raw RT distributions and fit several psychologically motivated functions (ex-Gaussian, ex-Wald, Gamma, and Weibull) to the data. We analyze and interpret parameter trends from these four functions within the context of theories of visual search.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0020747
