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Mental chronometry is the use of response time in perceptual-motor tasks to infer the content, duration, and temporal sequencing of cognitive operations. Mental chronometry is one of the core paradigms of experimental and cognitive psychology, and has found application in various disciplines including cognitive psychophysiology, cognitive neuroscience, and behavioral neuroscience to elucidate mechanisms underlying cognitive processing. Mental chronometry is studied using the measurements of reaction time (RT). Reaction time is the elapsed time between the presentation of a sensory stimulus and the subsequent behavioral response. In psychometric psychology it is considered to be an index of speed of processing.〔 That is, it indicates how fast the thinker can execute the mental operations needed by the task at hand. In turn, speed of processing is considered an index of processing efficiency. The behavioral response is typically a button press but can also be an eye movement, a vocal response, or some other observable behavior. ==Types== ''Response time'' is the sum ''reaction time'' plus ''movement time.'' Usually the focus in research is on reaction time. There are four basic means of measuring it: ''Simple'' reaction time is the motion required for an observer to respond to the presence of a stimulus. For example, a subject might be asked to press a button as soon as a light or sound appears. Mean RT for college-age individuals is about 160 milliseconds to detect an auditory stimulus, and approximately 190 milliseconds to detect visual stimulus.〔 The mean reaction times for sprinters at the Beijing Olympics were 166 ms for males and 189 ms for females, but in one out of 1,000 starts they can achieve 109 ms and 121 ms, respectively.〔 〕 Interestingly, this study also concluded that longer female reaction times can an artifact of the measurement method used, suggesting that the starting block sensor system might overlook a female false-start due to insufficient pressure on the pads. The authors suggested compensating for this threshold would improve false-start detection accuracy with female runners. ''Recognition'' or ''Go/No-Go'' reaction time tasks require that the subject press a button when one stimulus type appears and withhold a response when another stimulus type appears. For example, the subject may have to press the button when a green light appears and not respond when a blue light appears. ''Choice'' reaction time (CRT) tasks require distinct responses for each possible class of stimulus. For example, the subject might be asked to press one button if a red light appears and a different button if a yellow light appears. The Jensen box is an example of an instrument designed to measure choice reaction time. ''Discrimination'' reaction time involves comparing pairs of simultaneously presented visual displays and then pressing one of two buttons according to which display appears brighter, longer, heavier, or greater in magnitude on some dimension of interest. Due to momentary attentional lapses, there is a considerable amount of variability in an individual's response time, which does not tend to follow a normal (Gaussian) distribution. To control for this, researchers typically require a subject to perform multiple trials, from which a measure of the 'typical' response time can be calculated. Taking the mean of the raw response time is rarely an effective method of characterizing the typical response time, and alternative approaches (such as modeling the entire response time distribution) are often more appropriate.〔() Whelan, R. (2008). Effective analysis of reaction time data. The Psychological Record, 58, 475-482.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Mental chronometry」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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