Distribution of Human Response Times

TL;DR

This paper investigates the statistical distribution of human response times, revealing power-law tails and identifying the generalized inverse gamma distribution as the best fit, with implications for understanding task difficulty.

Contribution

It introduces the generalized inverse gamma distribution as a model for human response times and links distribution characteristics to task difficulty.

Findings

Response times have power-law tail distributions.

Generalized inverse gamma distribution best fits the data.

Task difficulty correlates with the distribution's half-width.

Abstract

We demonstrate that distributions of human response times have power-law tails and, among closed-form distributions, are best fit by the generalized inverse gamma distribution. We speculate that the task difficulty tracks the half-width of the distribution and show that it is related to the exponent of the power-law tail.