Chapter 3 - LATER as a Model of Decision

Summary

There are fashions in science just as in everything else, and the popularity of measuring the time required to make a response to a stimulus has waxed and waned over the years. The earliest investigators were motivated in part by a practical problem in astronomy, the difficulty of estimating the exact moment at which a star or planet reached the cross-hairs of a transit telescope (Wolf 1865, Mollon and Perkins 1996). This work revealed two striking kinds of variability. On average, different observers had very different reaction times (Henmon and Wells 1914) (the ‘personal equation’); in addition, reaction times varied greatly from one occasion to another. Later, with the rise of quantitative psychophysics in the nineteenth century, reaction time came to be seen as an objective parameter of psychological performance that could be obtained without very advanced recording technology (Boring 1929). But these data proved easier to obtain than to explain, and reaction times fell out of favour.