Pointing, looking at, and pressing keys: A diffusion model account of response modality.

Abstract

Accumulation of evidence models of perceptual decision making have been able to account for data from a wide range of domains at an impressive level of precision. In particular, Ratcliff's (1978) diffusion model has been used across many different 2-choice tasks in which the response is executed via a key-press. In this article, we present 2 experiments in which we used a letter-discrimination task exploring 3 central aspects of a 2-choice task: the discriminability of the stimulus, the modality of the response execution (eye movement, key pressing, and pointing on a touchscreen), and the mapping of the response areas for the eye movement and the touchscreen conditions (consistent vs. inconsistent). We fitted the diffusion model to the data from these experiments and examined the behavior of the model's parameters. Fits of the model were consistent with the hypothesis that the same decision mechanism is used in the task with 3 different response methods. Drift rates are affected by the duration of the presentation of the stimulus while the response execution time changed as a function of the response modality.