Time-evolving psychological processes over repeated decisions
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Many psychological experiments have participants repeat a simple task. This repetition is often necessary in order to gain the statistical precision required to answer questions about quantitative theories of the psychological processes underlying performance. In such experiments, time-on-task can have important and sizable effects on performance, changing the psychological processes under investigation in interesting ways. These changes are often ignored, and the underlying model is treated as static. We apply modern statistical approaches to extend a static model of decision-making to account for changes with time-on-task. Using data from three highly-cited experiments, we show that there are changes in performance with time-on-task, and that these changes vary substantially over individuals - both in magnitude and direction. Model-based analysis reveals how different cognitive processes contribute to the observed changes. We find strong evidence in favor of a first order autoregressive process governing the time-based evolution of individual subjects' model parameters. The central idea of our approach can be applied quite generally to quantitative psychological theories, beyond the model that we investigate and the experimental data that we use.
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