Using Response Time for Measuring Cognitive Ability Illustrated with Medical Diagnostic Reasoning Tasks

Abstract

In this chapter, the authors justify that belief by reviewing the role of response time measurement in cognitive psychology and recent attempts to provide a psychometric foundation for modeling response time. They illustrate some of these ideas in the context of a review of a cognitive architecture for medical diagnostic reasoning, which incorporates much of what we know about the cognitive processes associated with medical diagnostic reasoning. Cognitive psychology historically has been concerned with the processes underlying responses on cognitive tasks. But traditional abilities testing and individual differences research also have been concerned with processes. A cognitive components approach was another method designed to gain a process interpretation of a traditional ability test score. Examinees could be given a series of medical diagnostic reasoning tasks from symptom presentation to decision and confidence judgments, and conditions of the tasks could be manipulated experimentally to enable isolation of the various stages of problem solving.