A theory of power laws in human reaction times: insights from an information-processing approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Human reaction time (RT) can be defined as the time elapsed from stimulus presentation until a reaction/response occurs (e.g., manual, verbal, saccadic, etc.). RT has been a fundamental measure of the sensory-motor latency at suprathreshold conditions for more than a century and is one of the hallmarks of human performance in everyday tasks (Luce, 1986; Meyer et al., 1988). Some examples are the measurement of RTs in sports science, driving safety or in aging. Under repeated experimental conditions the RT is not a constant value but fluctuates irregularly over time. Stochastic fluctuations of RTs are considered a benchmark for modeling neural latency mechanisms at a macroscopic scale (Luce, 1986; Smith and Ratcliff, 2004). Power-law behavior has been reported in at least three major types of experiments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".