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Neural Computation and Psychology pp 34–48Cite as

Modelling Reaction Times

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Part of the book series: Workshops in Computing ((WORKSHOPS COMP.))

Abstract

We discuss the simulation of reaction times in connectionist systems. The obvious way to do this involves thinking in terms of neural activations building up towards some threshold in cascaded systems, but it has also been suggested that the output activation error scores in standard back-propagation networks should also be correlated with response times. The idea is that in the more realistic cascaded processing systems, the clearer the outputs (i.e. the lower the errors), the lower the time taken to reach the threshold. If this is correct and we can consider our simple feedforward networks to be reasonable approximations to these cascaded systems, then we have an easy way to simulate reaction times. However, the validity of this has been questioned. I will discuss these issues in some detail, suggest a more principled way of extracting simulated reaction times from back-propagation networks and show how this relates to the corresponding cascaded networks.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, 7 George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9JZ, UK

    John A. Bullinaria

Authors
  1. John A. Bullinaria
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computing Science, University of Stirling, Stirling, FK9 4LA, Scotland

    Leslie S. Smith BSc, PhD

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Stirling, FK9 4LA, Stirling, Scotland

    Peter J. B. Hancock MA, MSc, PhD

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© 1995 Springer-Verlag London

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Bullinaria, J.A. (1995). Modelling Reaction Times. In: Smith, L.S., Hancock, P.J.B. (eds) Neural Computation and Psychology. Workshops in Computing. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3579-1_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3579-1_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-19948-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4471-3579-1

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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