Adults with Poor Reading Skills, Older Adults, and College Students: the Meanings They Understand During Reading Using a Diffusion Model Analysis

On the Latent Structure of Responses and Response Times from Multidimensional Personality Measurement with Ordinal Rating Scales

In this article, we propose latent variable models that jointly account for responses and response times (RTs) in multidimensional personality measurements. We address two key research questions regarding the latent structure of RT distributions through model comparisons. First, we decompose RT into decision and non-decision times by incorporating irreducible minimum shifts in RT distributions, as done in cognitive decision-making models. Second, we investigate whether the speed factor underlying decision times should be multidimensional with the same latent structure as personality traits, or, if a unidimensional speed factor suffices. Comprehensive model comparisons across four distinct datasets suggest that a joint model with person-specific parameters to account for shifts in RT distributions and a unidimensional speed factor provides the best account for ordinal responses and RTs. Posterior predictive checks further confirm these findings. Additionally, simulation studies validate the parameter recovery of the proposed models and support the empirical results. Most importantly, failing to account for the irreducible minimum shift in RT distributions leads to systematic biases in other model components and severe underestimation of the nonlinear relationship between responses and RTs.

The effect of total sleep deprivation on working memory: evidence from diffusion model

STUDY OBJECTIVES

Working memory is crucial in human daily life and is vulnerable to sleep loss. The current study investigated the impact of sleep deprivation on working memory from the information processing perspective, to explore whether sleep deprivation affects the working memory via impairing information manipulation.

METHODS

Thirty-seven healthy adults attended two counterbalanced protocols: a normal sleep night and a total sleep deprivation (TSD). The N-back and the psychomotor vigilance task (PVT) assessed working memory and sustained attention. Response time distribution and drift-diffusion model analyses were applied to explore cognitive process alterations.

RESULTS

TSD increased the loading effect of accuracy, but not the loading effect of response time in the N-back task. TSD reduced the speed of information accumulation, increased the variability of the speed of accumulation, and elevated the decision threshold only in 1-back task. Moreover, the slow responses of PVT and N-back were severely impaired after TSD, mainly due to increased information accumulation variability.

CONCLUSIONS

The present study provides a new perspective to investigate behavioral performance by using response time distribution and drift-diffusion models, revealing that sleep deprivation affected multicognitive processes underlying working memory, especially information accumulation processes.

A Modeling Framework to Examine Psychological Processes Underlying Ordinal Responses and Response Times of Psychometric Data

This article presents a joint modeling framework of ordinal responses and response times (RTs) for the measurement of latent traits. We integrate cognitive theories of decision-making and confidence judgments with psychometric theories to model individual-level measurement processes. The model development starts with the sequential sampling framework which assumes that when an item is presented, a respondent accumulates noisy evidence over time to respond to the item. Several cognitive and psychometric theories are reviewed and integrated, leading us to three psychometric process models with different representations of the cognitive processes underlying the measurement. We provide simulation studies that examine parameter recovery and show the relationships between latent variables and data distributions. We further test the proposed models with empirical data measuring three traits related to motivation. The results show that all three models provide reasonably good descriptions of observed response proportions and RT distributions. Also, different traits favor different process models, which implies that psychological measurement processes may have heterogeneous structures across traits. Our process of model building and examination illustrates how cognitive theories can be incorporated into psychometric model development to shed light on the measurement process, which has had little attention in traditional psychometric models.

Syntactic prediction during self-paced reading is age invariant

Controversy exists as to whether, compared to young adults, older adults are more, equally or less likely to make linguistic predictions while reading. While previous studies have examined age effects on the prediction of upcoming words, the prediction of upcoming syntactic structures has been largely unexplored. We compared the benefit that young and older readers gain when the syntactic structure is made predictable, as well as potential age differences in the costs involved in making predictions. In a self-paced reading study, 60 young and 60 older adults read sentences in which noun-phrase coordination (e.g. large pizza or tasty calzone) is made predictable through the inclusion of the word either earlier in the sentence. Results showed a benefit of the presence of either in the second half of the coordination phrase, and a cost of the presence of either in the first half. We observed no age differences in the benefit or costs of making these predictions; Bayes factor analyses offered strong evidence that these effects are age invariant. Together, these findings suggest that both older and younger adults make similar strength syntactic predictions with a similar level of difficulty. We relate this age invariance in syntactic prediction to specific aspects of the ageing process.

Diving into a pool or volcano? Examining the influence of sentence context and task demands on sentence reading in younger and older adults

Cognitive ageing is often associated with slower lexical processing, which might influence both language production and comprehension. Words are typically used in context, which can further influence word processing and potential age differences. However, it remains unclear how older adults are affected by context during reading. Older adults are reported to have in-tact semantic knowledge, which could potentially help them to process words predicted by semantic information in the preceding context. However, potential difficulties with semantic control might mean older adults have greater difficulty suppressing interfering information from mismatching contexts. In this study we examined the influence of contexts that either predicted a specific target word ("matched", e.g., "The man watched the lava erupt from the volcano") or predicted another word than the target ("mismatched", e.g., "The swimmer dived into the volcano") as compared to neutral contexts (e.g., "They went to see the volcano"). We also examined the potential role of task demands by asking participants to either just read the sentences for comprehension or to answer questions. Forty younger adults (18-35 years old) and forty older adults (65-80 years old) completed a self-paced reading task in which we measured reading times for the target words. Older adults showed slower reading times overall. Matched sentence contexts facilitated reading times in both age groups. Surprisingly, mismatched sentence contexts did not hinder reading times in either age group. Furthermore, reading times were not influenced by task demands. Together, this shows the importance of studying language in context. While interference from mismatching sentence contexts might have not been substantial enough to delay reading, reading was faster when processing expected words. This suggests older adults can indeed benefit from semantic knowledge to facilitate word processing during comprehension. This occurred even when no additional task was presented and people were purely reading for comprehension.