Drift-Diffusion Model for One-choice Motor-Cognitive Dual-Task

Abstract

The ability of a human being to perform more than one task at the same time has been investigated in many studies. Performing more than one task simultaneously has always been a challenging topic in psychology and human perception fields. The output and the effect of two tasks have been studied in previous researches for understanding the brain’s performance and also the disease origin and the symptoms. The influence of different difficulty levels has been explored via discrete-continuous motor-cognitive dual-task (DT). To this aim, a manual tracking task combined with discrete auditory stimuli to establish DT procedure. Twenty-five participants in this paradigm were asked to track the target on screen while reacting to the auditory task at the same time. Two levels of difficulty in manual tracking plus a single auditory task (ST) were considered for the experiment. The variability of output via different difficulties was investigated by analyzing factors of error rate and the response time (RT). For this analysis, a Drift Diffusion Model (DDM) method was used. In this 4-parameter model, the drift parameter is assumed to show the difficulty levels. The results show that by applying different drift rates (the average of 0.5, 0.3, and 0.2), the model is consistent (more than 90 percent fitness) with experimental output RT and the drift parameter has the potential to be considered as the difficulty factor in the DT procedure to obtain more interpretable results.