A Response Model with a Fixed Number of Observations

Abstract

In addition to deriving several useful porperties of the optimal policy for both problems TDC and DC, another, more important, purpose of developing model FPB has been to provide testable properties for detection of change experiments, either ones that are specifically designed to study detection of change behavior, or others, such as certain reaction time studies, that may be reformulated and modeled as detection of change tasks. Of course, without experimental evidence we do not know whether or not model FPB may mirror the rules that human subjects employ to reach a decision on each stage of the process. Subjects may not revise the probability of change from S₀ to S₁ on each stage of the task and compare it to some predetermined probability boundary, fixed or not. Rather, it seems more likely that many would employ simpler decision rules based on the actual values of the observations they have taken. It is the purpose of the present chapter to introduce another deterministic response model based on a fixed number of observation values, subsequently termed model FNOB, and to study its properties. An even simpler response model will be introduced and studied in Chapter 5.