The baseline for response latency distributions

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that the right tails of response latency distributions follow a power-law with an exponent of two, challenging the common assumption of exponential decay and highlighting the importance of late responses in understanding cognitive processes.

Contribution

It reveals that response latency tails follow a universal power-law distribution with a fixed exponent, contradicting the traditional view of exponential decay and redefining the treatment of long latencies.

Findings

Right tails follow a power-law with slope two

Late responses are not outliers but informative

Challenges exponential tail predictions in current theories

Abstract

Response latency -- the time taken to initiate or complete an action or task -- is one of the principal measures used to investigate the mechanisms subserving human and animal cognitive processes. The right tails of response latency distributions have received little attention in experimental psychology. This is because such very long latencies have traditionally been considered irrelevant for psychological processes, instead, they are expected to reflect `contingent' neural events unrelated to the experimental question. Most current theories predict the right tail of response latency distributions to decrease exponentially. In consequence, current standard practice recommends discarding very long response latencies as `outliers'. Here, I show that the right tails of response latency distributions always follow a power-law with a slope of exactly two. This entails that the very late responses cannot be considered outliers. Rather they provide crucial information that falsifies most current theories of cognitive processing with respect to their exponential tail predictions. This exponent constitutes a fundamental constant of the cognitive system that groups behavioral measures with a variety of physical phenomena.