Applying proportional hazards models to response time data

In this chapter, we argue that the standard approaches to sum­ marizing and analyzing these response time (RT) data are not wellsuited to the fundamental constructs that researchers desire to assess. Specifically, we argue that although researchers are interested in measuring levels of and changes in the real-time capacity of individuals to process external and internal information, typical analyses only provide information about the average speed with which experimental tasks are performed. Further, we suggest that a set of reasonably well-known statistical techniques can be applied to RT data to allow direct inferences about real-time information processing capacity.