Procedures for manipulating the speed-accuracy trade-off

The speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT) is a fundamental cognitive process observed in a variety of decision-making tasks and paradigms. It is therefore important that the methods that we use to produce, manipulate and study this process be well understood. Despite the common use of various methods for manipulating the SAT (“methodologies”), little effort has been made to understand how variation in the quantifiable elements of the methods impacts the SAT. In this thesis I will examine the SAT, with a particular focus on exploring the quantitative outcomes of common methodologies. Specifically, I examine the two different SAT methodologies: timeout delays and random deadlines. This examination is furthered by an application of common modeling procedures to data from the random deadline experiment. The final experimental chapter explores how these methodologies are used in non-human animal studies to produce SAT behaviour. The results of these experiments indicate that these methods are unsuitable for producing variable SAT behaviour in both humans and non-human animals, and that verbal instructions may remain the best option for the foreseeable future. A discussion of the future of modeling the SAT is also presented, where among others, a radical shift to a binary SAT model is discussed.