AUTHOR=Diependaele Kevin , Brysbaert Marc , Neri Peter TITLE=How Noisy is Lexical Decision? JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology VOLUME=3 YEAR=2012 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00348 DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00348 ISSN=1664-1078 ABSTRACT=
Lexical decision is one of the most frequently used tasks in word recognition research. Theoretical conclusions are typically derived from a linear model on the reaction times (RTs) of correct word trials only (e.g., linear regression and ANOVA). Although these models estimate random measurement error for RTs, considering only correct trials implicitly assumes that word/non-word categorizations are without noise: words receive a yes-response because they have been recognized, and they receive a no-response when they are not known. Hence, when participants are presented with the same stimuli on two separate occasions, they are expected to give the same response. We demonstrate that this not true and that responses in a lexical decision task suffer from inconsistency in participants’ response choice, meaning that RTs of “correct” word responses include RTs of trials on which participants did not recognize the stimulus. We obtained estimates of this internal noise using established methods from sensory psychophysics (Burgess and Colborne,