When: Thursday 4th December, 12-1pm
Where: Keats Reading Room, Psychology Building
What: Gabriel Tilman's PhD Confirmation Seminar
How Do Our Past Decisions Affect Our Present Decisions? – An Innovative Model
In simple perceptual experiments responses made on a trial are influenced by responses
made on previous trials: a phenomenon known as sequential effects. The dominant
explanation of sequential effects is the conflict monitoring theory (Botvinick, Braver,
Barch, Carter, & Cohen, 2001), which assumes individuals possesses an explicit conflict
monitoring mechanism. Here innovative models are proposed, which can account for
sequential effects without the need of a ’intelligent’ mechanism. The two models will be
adapted from the Linear Ballistic Accumulator (LBA) and the Drift Diffusion Model
(DDM). The models will be fit to data from the Flanker, Simon and Stroop tasks. The
capacity of both models to account for three prominent sequential effects – the conflict
frequency effect, sequential dependency, and post-error slowing – are compared.
