The Speed–Accuracy Tradeoff as a Subject of Psychological Analysis

The present research featured the regularities, according to which the accuracy of human movements is associated with the length of these movements and time. The author considered the speed–accuracy tradeoff problem by analyzing the procedural aspect of cognitive performance. The experiment included more than a thousand participants and was performed on a portable touch screen device that tested the subject's attitude to solving problems in terms of speed or accuracy. The research objective was to identify significantly different ways of solving the speed–accuracy tradeoff dilemma. At the fine motor level, the participants failed to accomplish a one-to-one correspondence between target area and target time. This ambiguity was a manifestation of various cognitive strategies for performing a speed–accuracy tradeoff task. The Fitts law violations were determined using a wide range of statistical methods and manifested themselves at the level of criteria analysis for the normality of data distribution, types of variance analysis, and multivariate data analysis. The cluster analysis could register various strategies for performing the speed–accuracy tradeoff task. Additional variables, e.g. professional status of the subjects, made it possible to interpret the differences according to specific skills in solving cognitive tasks and to clarify the nature of these skills.

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Prolonged response time helps eliminate residual errors in visuomotor adaptation

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review ◽

10.3758/s13423-020-01865-x ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Lisa Langsdorf ◽

Jana Maresch ◽

Mathias Hegele ◽

Samuel D. McDougle ◽

Raphael Schween

Keyword(s):

Cognitive Strategies ◽

Motor Planning ◽

Visuomotor Adaptation ◽

Movement Planning ◽

Planning Time ◽

Full Compensation ◽

Speed Accuracy ◽

Residual Errors ◽

Prolonged Response ◽

Accuracy Tradeoff

AbstractOne persistent curiosity in visuomotor adaptation tasks is that participants often do not reach maximal performance. This incomplete asymptote has been explained as a consequence of obligatory computations within the implicit adaptation system, such as an equilibrium between learning and forgetting. A body of recent work has shown that in standard adaptation tasks, cognitive strategies operate alongside implicit learning. We reasoned that incomplete learning in adaptation tasks may primarily reflect a speed-accuracy tradeoff on time-consuming motor planning. Across three experiments, we find evidence supporting this hypothesis, showing that hastened motor planning may primarily lead to under-compensation. When an obligatory waiting period was administered before movement start, participants were able to fully counteract imposed perturbations (Experiment 1). Inserting the same delay between trials – rather than during movement planning – did not induce full compensation, suggesting that the motor planning interval influences the learning asymptote (Experiment 2). In the last experiment (Experiment 3), we asked participants to continuously report their movement intent. We show that emphasizing explicit re-aiming strategies (and concomitantly increasing planning time) also lead to complete asymptotic learning. Findings from all experiments support the hypothesis that incomplete adaptation is, in part, the result of an intrinsic speed-accuracy tradeoff, perhaps related to cognitive strategies that require parametric attentional reorienting from the visual target to the goal.

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How is a motor skill learned? Change and invariance at the levels of task success and trajectory control

Journal of Neurophysiology ◽

10.1152/jn.00856.2011 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 108 (2) ◽

pp. 578-594 ◽

Cited By ~ 200

Author(s):

Lior Shmuelof ◽

John W. Krakauer ◽

Pietro Mazzoni

Keyword(s):

Skill Acquisition ◽

Motor Skill ◽

Skill Learning ◽

Learning Performance ◽

Fine Motor ◽

Wide Range ◽

Task Success ◽

Scalable Network ◽

Speed Accuracy ◽

Task Level

The public pays large sums of money to watch skilled motor performance. Notably, however, in recent decades motor skill learning (performance improvement beyond baseline levels) has received less experimental attention than motor adaptation (return to baseline performance in the setting of an external perturbation). Motor skill can be assessed at the levels of task success and movement quality, but the link between these levels remains poorly understood. We devised a motor skill task that required visually guided curved movements of the wrist without a perturbation, and we defined skill learning at the task level as a change in the speed–accuracy trade-off function (SAF). Practice in restricted speed ranges led to a global shift of the SAF. We asked how the SAF shift maps onto changes in trajectory kinematics, to establish a link between task-level performance and fine motor control. Although there were small changes in mean trajectory, improved performance largely consisted of reduction in trial-to-trial variability and increase in movement smoothness. We found evidence for improved feedback control, which could explain the reduction in variability but does not preclude other explanations such as an increased signal-to-noise ratio in cortical representations. Interestingly, submovement structure remained learning invariant. The global generalization of the SAF across a wide range of difficulty suggests that skill for this task is represented in a temporally scalable network. We propose that motor skill acquisition can be characterized as a slow reduction in movement variability, which is distinct from faster model-based learning that reduces systematic error in adaptation paradigms.

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The Role of Visual Mental Imagery in the Speed-Accuracy Tradeoff: A Preliminary Investigation

Journal of Educational Technology Systems ◽

10.2190/36ur-wc53-3rkj-1tfw ◽

1994 ◽

Vol 23 (1) ◽

pp. 53-61

Author(s):

Carol L. Hodes

Keyword(s):

Mental Imagery ◽

Preliminary Investigation ◽

Cognitive Strategies ◽

Imagery Instruction ◽

Additional Time ◽

Retrieval Time ◽

Time To Learn ◽

Speed Accuracy ◽

Accuracy Tradeoff

Subjects who were given imagery instruction prior to receiving the stimulus material required significantly more time to learn the material. The additional time indicates imagery use. The instructed subjects also had significantly faster retrieval time on a recognition posttest. Thus, there is an inverse relationship between learning time and retrieval time for imaged information. The posttest scores of the instructed subjects were not significantly higher than the uninstructed subjects. The two groups also had similar perceptions of their use of mental imagery. Mental imagery is proposed as a technique to help reduce the speed-accuracy tradeoff during performance. Imagery needs to be investigated further as a type of task-specific processing, since it involves deeper information processing than other cognitive strategies.

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Neuroticism and Speed-Accuracy Tradeoff in Self-Paced Speeded Mental Addition and Comparison

Journal of Individual Differences ◽

10.1027/1614-0001/a000021 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 31 (3) ◽

pp. 130-137 ◽

Cited By ~ 12

Author(s):

Hagen C. Flehmig ◽

Michael B. Steinborn ◽

Karl Westhoff ◽

Robert Langner

Keyword(s):

Reaction Time ◽

Response Speed ◽

Time Variability ◽

Reaction Time Variability ◽

Comparison Task ◽

Processing Efficiency ◽

Mental Addition ◽

Speed Accuracy ◽

The Relationship ◽

Accuracy Tradeoff

Previous research suggests a relationship between neuroticism (N) and the speed-accuracy tradeoff in speeded performance: High-N individuals were observed performing less efficiently than low-N individuals and compensatorily overemphasizing response speed at the expense of accuracy. This study examined N-related performance differences in the serial mental addition and comparison task (SMACT) in 99 individuals, comparing several performance measures (i.e., response speed, accuracy, and variability), retest reliability, and practice effects. N was negatively correlated with mean reaction time but positively correlated with error percentage, indicating that high-N individuals tended to be faster but less accurate in their performance than low-N individuals. The strengthening of the relationship after practice demonstrated the reliability of the findings. There was, however, no relationship between N and distractibility (assessed via measures of reaction time variability). Our main findings are in line with the processing efficiency theory, extending the relationship between N and working style to sustained self-paced speeded mental addition.

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Linking Personality With Basic Cognition: Need for Closure vs. the Speed-Accuracy Tradeoff

PsycEXTRA Dataset ◽

10.1037/e528942014-512 ◽

2014 ◽

Author(s):

Babette Rae ◽

Scott Brown ◽

Maxim Bushmakin ◽

Mark Rubin

Keyword(s):

Need For Closure ◽

Speed Accuracy ◽

Basic Cognition ◽

Accuracy Tradeoff

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Speed/accuracy tradeoff in directed forgetting

PsycEXTRA Dataset ◽

10.1037/e536982012-049 ◽

1997 ◽

Author(s):

Jeffry S. Kellogg ◽

Xiangen Hu ◽

William Marks

Keyword(s):

Directed Forgetting ◽

Speed Accuracy ◽

Accuracy Tradeoff

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Faculty Opinions recommendation of One process is not enough! A speed-accuracy tradeoff study of recognition memory.

Faculty Opinions – Post-Publication Peer Review of the Biomedical Literature ◽

10.3410/f.1022398.255622 ◽

2004 ◽

Author(s):

Andrew Yonelinas

Keyword(s):

Recognition Memory ◽

Speed Accuracy ◽

Accuracy Tradeoff

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Trading accuracy for speed over the course of a decision

Journal of Neurophysiology ◽

10.1152/jn.00038.2021 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Gerard Derosiere ◽

David Thura ◽

Paul Cisek ◽

Julie Duqué

Keyword(s):

Late Stage ◽

Human Subjects ◽

Sensory Information ◽

Decision Task ◽

Unique Extension ◽

Dynamic Changes ◽

Performance Accuracy ◽

Accuracy Criterion ◽

Speed Accuracy ◽

Accuracy Tradeoff

Humans and other animals often need to balance the desire to gather sensory information (to make the best choice) with the urgency to act, facing a speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT). Given the ubiquity of SAT across species, extensive research has been devoted to understanding the computational mechanisms allowing its regulation at different timescales, including from one context to another, and from one decision to another. However, animals must frequently change their SAT on even shorter timescales - i.e., over the course of an ongoing decision - and little is known about the mechanisms that allow such rapid adaptations. The present study aimed at addressing this issue. Human subjects performed a decision task with changing evidence. In this task, subjects received rewards for correct answers but incurred penalties for mistakes. An increase or a decrease in penalty occurring halfway through the trial promoted rapid SAT shifts, favoring speeded decisions either in the early or in the late stage of the trial. Importantly, these shifts were associated with stage-specific adjustments in the accuracy criterion exploited for committing to a choice. Those subjects who decreased the most their accuracy criterion at a given decision stage exhibited the highest gain in speed, but also the highest cost in terms of performance accuracy at that time. Altogether, the current findings offer a unique extension of previous work, by suggesting that dynamic changes in accuracy criterion allow the regulation of the SAT within the timescale of a single decision.

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