Open AccessDistribution of human response times
Author(s) -
Ma Tao,
Holden John G.,
Serota R. A.
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
complexity
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.447
H-Index - 61
eISSN - 1099-0526
pISSN - 1076-2787
DOI - 10.1002/cplx.21666
Subject(s) - distribution (mathematics) , exponent , statistical physics , power law , inverse , mathematics , power (physics) , physics , statistics , mathematical analysis , geometry , quantum mechanics , philosophy , linguistics
We confirm that distributions of human response times have power‐law tails and argue that, among closed‐form distributions, the generalized inverse gamma distribution is the most plausible choice for their description. We speculate that the task difficulty tracks the half‐width of the distribution and show that it is related to the exponent of the power‐law tail. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 21: 61–69, 2016