title: The effect of noise-induced variance on parameter recovery from reaction times.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Technical noise can compromise the precision and accuracy of the reaction times collected in psychological experiments, especially in the case of Internet-based studies. Although this noise seems to have only a small impact on traditional statistical analyses, its effects on model fit to reaction-time distributions remains unexplored.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Across four simulations we study the impact of technical noise on parameter recovery from data generated from an ex-Gaussian distribution and from a Ratcliff Diffusion Model. Our results suggest that the impact of noise-induced variance tends to be limited to specific parameters and conditions.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Although we encourage researchers to adopt all measures to reduce the impact of noise on reaction-time experiments, we conclude that the typical amount of noise-induced variance found in these experiments does not pose substantial problems for statistical analyses based on model fitting.
authors.affiliation: Primary Care and Public Health Sciences, King's College London, Addison House, Guy's Campus, London, SE1 1UL, UK. miguel.vadillo@kcl.ac.uk.|Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, 26 Bedford Way, London, WC1H 0AH, UK. miguel.vadillo@kcl.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Miguel A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Vadillo
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Engineering, Universidad de Deusto, Avda. Universidades 24, Bilbao, 48007, Spain.
authors.forename: Pablo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Garaizar
mesh_terms: D016477:Artifacts; D003952:Diagnostic Imaging; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D016011:Normal Distribution; D011930:Reaction Time
keywords: Internet-based experiments; Model fitting; Psychological experiments; Ratcliff Diffusion Model; Reaction times; ex-Gaussian distribution