Farrell Simon, Wagenmakers Eric-Jan, Ratcliff Roger
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Bristol, 12a Priory Road, Clifton, Bristol BS8 1TU, England.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2006 Aug;13(4):737-41. doi: 10.3758/bf03193989.
Researchers in psychology are paying increasing attention to temporal correlations in performance on cognitive tasks. Recently, Thornton and Gilden (2005) introduced a spectral method for analyzing psychological time series; in particular, this method is tailored to distinguish transient serial correlations from the persistent correlations characterized by 1/f noise. Thornton and Gilden applied their method to word-naming data to support the claimed ubiquity of 1/f noise in psychological time series. We argue that a previously presented method for distinguishing transient and persistent correlations (e.g., Wagenmakers, Farrell, and Ratcliff, 2004) compares favorably with the new method presented by Thornton and Gilden. We apply Thornton and Gilden's method to time series from a range of cognitive tasks and show that 1/f noise is not a ubiquitous property of psychological time series. Finally, we assess the theoretical developments in this area and argue that the development of well-specified models of the principles or mechanisms of human cognition giving rise to 1/f noise is long overdue.
心理学领域的研究人员越来越关注认知任务表现中的时间相关性。最近，桑顿和吉尔登（2005年）引入了一种用于分析心理时间序列的频谱方法；具体而言，该方法旨在区分瞬态序列相关性与以1/f噪声为特征的持久相关性。桑顿和吉尔登将他们的方法应用于单词命名数据，以支持1/f噪声在心理时间序列中普遍存在的说法。我们认为，之前提出的一种区分瞬态和持久相关性的方法（例如，瓦根梅克斯、法雷尔和拉特克利夫，2004年）与桑顿和吉尔登提出的新方法相比更具优势。我们将桑顿和吉尔登的方法应用于一系列认知任务的时间序列，并表明1/f噪声并非心理时间序列的普遍属性。最后，我们评估了该领域的理论发展，并认为早就应该开发出关于产生1/f噪声的人类认知原理或机制的详细模型了。
