Open Science Tools / Pavlovia
4 minutes
Choice Reaction Time Adds a Decision Cost to Baseline Speed
In a choice reaction time task several stimuli each map to a different response, so the participant must identify the stimulus and select the matching key. The added time over a simple reaction, and its growth with the number of alternatives described by Hick's law, isolates the cost of stimulus identification and response selection. Comparing reaction times across conditions is the subtraction method that most cognitive experiments depend on.