Connectionist and diffusion models of reaction time.

Two connectionist frameworks, GRAIN (J. L. McClelland, 1993) and brain-state-in-a-box (J. A. Anderson, 1991), and R. Ratcliff's (1978) diffusion model were evaluated using data from a signal detection task. Dependent variables included response probabilities, reaction times (RTs) for correct and error responses, and shapes of RT distributions. The diffusion model accounted for all aspects of the data, including error RTs that had previously been a problem for all response-time models. The connectionist models accounted for many aspects of the data adequately, but each failed to a greater or lesser degree in important ways except for one model that was similar to the diffusion model. The findings advance the development of the diffusion model and show that the long tradition of RT research and theory is a fertile domain for development and testing of connectionist assumptions about how decisions are generated over time. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)