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The Irrelevance of Distributional Assumptions on Reaction Times in Multidimensional Scaling of Same/Different Judgment Tasks

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Gert Storms  and
Luc Delbeke
Gert Storms*
Affiliation:
Katholieke University Leuven, Belgium
Luc Delbeke
Affiliation:
Katholieke University Leuven, Belgium
*
Requests for reprints should be sent to Gert Storms, University of Leuven, Tiensestraat 102, B-3000 Leuven, BELGIUM.
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Abstract

Takane and Sergent developed a model (MAXRT) for scaling same/different judgments and response times (RTs) simultaneously. The model assumes that RTs are distributed lognormally. Our experiment showed that the RT distribution of the judgments might be task dependent. It is shown that lognormal RTs provide a far better fit than exponential, normal, and Pareto distributed RTs (with the same means and variances), but that the final parameter estimates from the data set with lognormal RTs hardly differ from the alternatively distributed RTs. Finally, despite the robustness of the distributional assumption of the RTs with respect to the parameter estimates, it is shown that RTs have an informational value that is not contained in the same/different judgments alone.

Keywords

response timesdistributionsmaximum likelihood scalinglikelihood ratio x2Shapiro-Wilk testAIC statisticpairwise judgments
Type
Original Paper
Information
Psychometrika , Volume 57 , Issue 4 , December 1992 , pp. 599 - 614
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 The Psychometric Society

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Footnotes

The authors thank Jan Beirlant, Geert De Soete, Yoshio Takane, the three reviewers, and the Editor, for their useful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. We are also indebted to Noël Bovens for his help in programming the experiments.

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