Ratcliff

Analysing reaction times - Revisiting Ratcliff (1993) (pt 1)

Reaction times are a very common outcome measure in psychological science. Frequently, people use the mean to summarise reaction time distributions and compares means across conditions using ANOVAs. For example, in a typical experiment, researchers might record reaction times to familiar and unfamiliar faces, and look for differences in mean reaction time across these two types of stimuli. An issue with this is that reaction time distributions are skewed: there are many more short values than long values, so their distribution has a long right tail.