Modeling Response Time with Power Law Distributions

This article overviews several contemporary models that assume power law scaling is a plausible description of the skewed right tails that are typical of response time distributions. The properties and markers of these distribution functions have implications for cognitive and neurophysiological dynamics. The power law hypothesis suggests studies should collect larger samples, and that analyses may combine individual subjects' data into a single set for a distribution-function contrasts. Techniques for contrasting response time measurements are illustrated on data from a previously published study comparing the performance of children diagnosed with dyslexia and a group of age-matched controls in flanker, color naming, word naming, and arithmetic performance.