Deep learning as an alternative to global optimization in diffusion model for conflict tasks
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Abstract
To apply mathematical models of decision making in psychological research, researchers
need ways to extract model parameters from behavioural studies. The expansion of the
drift diffusion model to con
ict tasks (DMC) (Ulrich, Schroter, Leuthold, & Birngruber,
2015) resulted in the model being non-differentiable, which means that the parameters
of DMC can only be estimated.
The current methods for recovering parameters from DMC rely on comparing reaction
time (RT) distributions. Such methods will struggle to recover all DMC parameters well
due to the of the solution space of DMC, which means that some parameters can be
confused with others when RT distributions are compared.
Following that, five global optimization algorithms from different optimization families
were compared to create a benchmark for parameter recovery from DMC. The
results revealed that differential evolution outperformed the other four optimization
algorithms in recovery of parameters from both distributions with high and low trial
numbers.
Even though differential evolution is capable of recovering parameters well, it is very
expensive in computational time, which means that researchers who do not have access
to vast computational resources cannot apply DMC in their research. Due to this, deep
learning was investigated in application of parameter recovery from DMC. The results
showed that deep learning recovered all model parameters exceptionally well from RT
distributions with large trial numbers, and as well as differential evolution from RT distributions
with low trial numbers, which allows application of deep learning models in deployment
pipelines that take seconds rather than months.
Finally, deep learning models were applied in several experimental studies investigating
the effects of speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT) in response inhibition and perceptual decision
making tasks, and how the performance relates between the tasks and over two
different testing sessions, and demonstrated the effects of SAT on DMC parameters in
different tasks