Is there meat in the tail of reaction time distributions? From lexical processing models to attentional control in healthy aging and early stage Alzheimer’s disease

Time: 04:00pm - 05:00pm 

Place: Psychology Room 101

David Balota (Washington University in St. Louis)

The vast majority of studies of mental chronometry emphasize the influence of variables on mean performance. Variability around the mean is most often treated as a nuisance. There has been a recent increase in exploring the influence of variables on characteristics of the shape of reaction time distributions, including variability around the mean and measures related to skewness. Results from this approach will be presented regarding the unique and combined influence of three classic variables in visual word recognition: semantic priming, word frequency, and stimulus degradation. In addition, evidence will be presented which demonstrates that the characteristics of the reaction time distribution above and beyond the mean are highly sensitive to subtle individual differences in vocabulary knowledge. Finally, results from a large scale study indicate that response latencies in the slow tail of the reaction time distributions appear particularly sensitive to attentional control mechanisms in both healthy aging and early stage Alzheimer’s disease.

In category: Morphosyntax and semantics