School of Psychology, University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW 2308 Australia.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2009 Dec;16(6):1129-35. doi: 10.3758/PBR.16.6.1129.
Theories of choice response time (RT) provide insight into the psychological underpinnings of simple decisions. Evidence accumulation (or sequential sampling) models are the most successful theories of choice RT. These models all have the same "scaling" property--that a subset of their parameters can be multiplied by the same amount without changing their predictions. This property means that a single parameter must be fixed to allow the estimation of the remaining parameters. In the present article, we show that the traditional solution to this problem has overconstrained these models, unnecessarily restricting their ability to account for data and making implicit--and therefore unexamined--psychological assumptions. We show that versions of these models that address the scaling problem in a minimal way can provide a better description of data than can their overconstrained counterparts, even when increased model complexity is taken into account.
选择反应时间 (RT) 理论为简单决策的心理基础提供了深入的了解。证据积累（或序列采样）模型是选择 RT 最成功的理论。这些模型都具有相同的“缩放”属性——它们的参数子集可以乘以相同的量而不会改变它们的预测。该属性意味着必须固定单个参数，以便估计其余参数。在本文中，我们表明，解决此问题的传统方法过度限制了这些模型，不必要地限制了它们解释数据的能力，并做出了隐含的（因此未经过检验的）心理假设。我们表明，与过度约束的模型相比，即使考虑到模型复杂性的增加，以最小方式解决缩放问题的这些模型的版本也可以更好地描述数据。
