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Generalising the drift rate distribution for linear ballistic accumulators

journal contribution
posted on 2023-05-18, 15:46 authored by Terry, A, Marley, AAJ, Barnwal, A, Wagenmakers, E-J, Heathcote, A, Brown, SD
The linear ballistic accumulator model is a theory of decision-making that has been used to analyse data from human and animal experiments. It represents decisions as a race between independent evidence accumulators, and has proven successful in a form assuming a normal distribution for accumulation (“drift”) rates. However, this assumption has some limitations, including the corollary that some decision times are negative or undefined. We show that various drift rate distributions with strictly positive support can be substituted for the normal distribution without loss of analytic tractability, provided the candidate distribution has a closed-form expression for its mean when truncated to a closed interval. We illustrate the approach by developing three new linear ballistic accumulation variants, in which the normal distribution for drift rates is replaced by either the lognormal, Fréchet, or gamma distribution. We compare some properties of these new variants to the original normal-rate model.

History

Publication title

Journal of Mathematical Psychology

Volume

68-69

Pagination

49-58

ISSN

0022-2496

Department/School

Tasmanian School of Medicine

Publisher

Academic Press Inc Elsevier Science

Place of publication

United States

Rights statement

© 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Repository Status

  • Restricted

Socio-economic Objectives

Expanding knowledge in psychology

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