Department of Psychology, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand.
Conscious Cogn. 2010 Dec;19(4):1013-36. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2010.06.001. Epub 2010 Jun 26.
Four experiments examined how accurately participants can report the times of their own decisions. Within an auditory reaction time (RT) task, participants reported the time at which (a) the tone was presented, (b) they decided on the response, or (c) the response key was pressed. Decision time reports were checked for plausibility against the actual RTs, and we compared the effects of experimental manipulations on these two measures to see whether the reported decision times showed appropriate effects. In addition, we estimated the amount of error associated with individual decision time reports by checking how often participants' decision time reports were implausibly early (i.e., before stimulus onset) or late (i.e., after response), and by using several quantitative models. Overall, the results suggest that decision time reports are not very accurate but they may be usable for some purposes.
四项实验考察了参与者报告自己决策时间的准确性。在听觉反应时（RT）任务中，参与者报告了（a）声调呈现的时间、（b）他们决定做出反应的时间，或（c）按下反应键的时间。对决策时间报告进行了真实性检查，以与实际 RT 进行比较，并比较了实验操作对这两个测量值的影响，以确定报告的决策时间是否显示出适当的效果。此外，我们通过检查参与者的决策时间报告是否不切实际地过早（即，在刺激出现之前）或过晚（即，在响应之后）的频率，以及使用几种定量模型，估计了与个别决策时间报告相关的误差量。总体而言，结果表明决策时间报告不太准确，但它们可能对某些目的有用。
