ABSTRACT
The effect of a response deadline on categorical decisions was investigated. Time available for response was manipulated in the test phase, along with stimulus difficulty. Effects of these manipulations were observed in response accuracy, and in the mean, standard deviation and skew of the reaction times. The effects observed demonstrate that participants responded to the deadline in an adaptive manner - reducing their reaction time to long-latency decisions whilst leaving short latency decisions relatively unaffected. A simple connectionist model of categorical decisions (Wills & McLaren, 1997) is shown to account for this behavior.
