Understanding the structure of cognitive noise.

ABSTRACT: Human cognition is fundamentally noisy. While routinely regarded as a nuisance in experimental investigation, the few studies investigating properties of cognitive noise have found surprising structure. A first line of research has shown that inter-response-time distributions are heavy-tailed. That is, response times between subsequent trials usually change only a small amount, but with occasional large changes. A second, separate, line of research has found that participants' estimates and response times both exhibit long-range autocorrelations (i.e., 1/f noise). Thus, each judgment and response time not only depends on its immediate predecessor but also on many previous responses. These two lines of research use different tasks and have distinct theoretical explanations: models that acco

SUBMITTER: Zhu JQ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9423631 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature