title: How to assess the existence of competing strategies in cognitive tasks: a primer on the fixed-point property.
abstract: When multiple strategies can be used to solve a type of problem, the observed response time distributions are often mixtures of multiple underlying base distributions each representing one of these strategies. For the case of two possible strategies, the observed response time distributions obey the fixed-point property. That is, there exists one reaction time that has the same probability of being observed irrespective of the actual mixture proportion of each strategy. In this paper we discuss how to compute this fixed-point, and how to statistically assess the probability that indeed the observed response times are generated by two competing strategies. Accompanying this paper is a free R package that can be used to compute and test the presence or absence of the fixed-point property in response time data, allowing for easy to use tests of strategic behavior.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Leendert
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: van Maanen
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Ritske
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: de Jong
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Hedderik
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: van Rijn
mesh_terms: D003071:Cognition; D003198:Computer Simulation; D006801:Humans; D008960:Models, Psychological; D009010:Monte Carlo Method; D011930:Reaction Time