Aging and response times: A comparison of sequential sampling models

Abstract

This chapter examines the effects of ageing on cognitive processes in two choice tasks. It fits the diffusion model to the response time and accuracy data for each task, and interprets the effects of ageing in terms of the components of processing identified by the model. The chapter addresses whether the interpretations are specific to the diffusion model. To address this question, it fits two other models, the accumulator model and the leaky competing accumulator model of Usher and McClelland, to the data from young and older subjects for six experiments. The chapter finds that, although the diffusion model fits the data better than the other models for most of the experiments, the models'..