THE ROBUSTNESS AND APPLICABILITY OF SPEED-ACCURACY DECOMPOSITION, A TECHNIQUE FOR MEASURING PARTIAL INFORMATION

Speed-accuracy decomposition (SAD) is a relatively new technique for s tudying the time course of information processing. It uses information on both the temporal distributions and the accuracies of participants ' responses to two types of trials to derive an estimate of the amount of partial information available to participants at specific points i n processing. As a new technique, its range of applicability and robus tness have not yet been fully determined. Simulations are reported her e that investigate these issues, with simulated data sets, SAD analysi s of same, and comparison of the SAD analysis results to the parameter s used to generate the data. In general, SAD appears to be reasonably robust against certain violations of assumptions and a variety of unus ual data patterns. It is recommended that future SAD studies be accomp anied by simulations based on observed parameters to better understand the data obtained.