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A racial priming article claimed that, relative to a controlcondition, an exotic variety of variability, called 1/ƒ noise, isaltered when stereotypes impact participants’ judgments in animplicit prejudice task (Correll, 2008). However, Madurskiand LeBel (2014) recently described two powerful, faithfullycloned, and apparently decisive studies that each failed toreturn a successful literal replication of Correll’s report.Madurski and LeBel outlined and subsequently eliminatedseveral potential extraneous reasons for their replicationfailures, such as different participant demographics,participant non-compliance, poor psychometrics, andhardware discrepancies. By contrast, this article reports asuccessful conceptual replication of the pattern reported byCorrell (cf. Schmidt, 2009). Notably, this conceptualreplication required adjustments to Correll’s original methodand statistical analyses. All the changes were dictated by asystems theory of 1/ƒ noise that was largely in place prior toCorrell’s report (Kello, Beltz, Holden, & Van Orden, 2007;Van Orden, Holden, & Turvey, 2003; 2005). Implications forthe replication debate are discussed, with emphasis oncontextualizing implicit cues.

Study participants are typically unable to generate binary button-press sequences that pass as classically random sequences, such as from successive "fair coin" flips. Instead, their sequences repeat or alternate between responses too often. These deviations from randomness are commonly explained in terms of limitations or idiosyncrasies in cognitive processing. This article tests a novel hypothesis that randomness departures in participant-generated binary sequences are driven by coordination dynamics; alternating and repeating sequences are related to bimanual coordination attractors. Participants (N = 128) were asked to generate sequences that were representative of a random sequence, by successively pressing either of two buttons across 1,600 trials. Statistical analyses identify the binary button-press dynamics with a discrete sine-circle version of the Haken, Kelso, Bunz bimanual coordination model. Permutation analyses revealed the most common one- to five-trial subsequences were identified with the most dynamically stable coordinative relationships, consistent with bimanual coordination predictions. The sequences were consistent with scaling noises. Thus, participants' sequences departed from classical randomness by virtue of membership in a more inclusive category of variability that subsumes classical randomness. Recurrence quantification analysis revealed the mixture of stochasticity and determinism in the sequences was better approximated by the sine-circle model than by phase-randomized surrogate data sets that preserved both the power spectral densities and distributions of each participant's sequence. A relationship between randomness production and two-alternative forced-choice performance is established that constrains response time distribution models. The article's organization illustrates a nonreductive approach to inference for cognitive systems, inspired by statistical physics concepts such as renormalization group theory and universality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article overviews several contemporary models that assume power law scaling is a plausible description of the skewed right tails that are typical of response time distributions. The properties and markers of these distribution functions have implications 16,· cognitive and neurophysiological dynamics. The power law hypothesis suggests studies should collect larger samples, and that analyses may combine individual subjects' data into a single setfor a distributionjiinction contrasts. Techniques for contrasting response time measurements are illustrated on data from a previously published study comparing the performance of children diagnosed with dyslexia and a group of age-matched controls in flanker, color naming, word naming, and arithmetic perfurmance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We confirm that distributions of human response times have power-law tails and argue that, among closed-form distributions, the generalized inverse gamma distribution is the most plausible choice for their description. We speculate that the task difficulty tracks the half-width of the distribution and show that it is related to the exponent of the power-law tail. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 21: 61-69, 2016 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to make sense of a scene, a person must pay attention to several levels of nested order, ranging from the most differentiated details of the display to the integrated whole. In adults, research shows that the processes of integration and differentiation have the signature of self-organization. Does the same hold for children? The current study addresses this question with children between 6 and 9 years of age, using two tasks that require attention to hierarchical displays. A group of adults were tested as well, for control purposes. To get at the question of self-organization, reaction times were submitted to a detrended fluctuation analysis and a recurrence quantification analysis. H exponents show a long-range correlations (1/f noise), and recurrence measures (percent determinism, maximum line, entropy, and trend), show a deterministic structure of variability being characteristic of self-organizing systems. Findings are discussed in terms of organism-environment coupling that gives rise to fluid attention to hierarchical displays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A display that contains hierarchically nested levels of order requires the perceiver to selectively attend to one of the levels. We investigate the degree to which such selective attention is sustained by a soft-assembled emergent coordinative process, one that does not require designated executive control. In the case of emergent soft-assembly, performance from one trial to the next should show characteristic interdependence, visible in the fractal structure of reaction time. To test this hypothesis, we asked participants across three experiments to decide whether two displays matched in a certain way (e.g., in a local element). In order to gauge this coordinative process, task constraints were experimentally manipulated (e.g., familiarity, predictability, and task instruction). Obtained reaction-time data were subjected to a spectral analysis to measure the degree of interdependence among trials. As predicted, results show correlated structure across trials, significantly different from what would be predicted by an independent-process view of selective attention. Results also show that the obtained spectral scaling exponents track the degree of coupling in the task as a function of the degree of task constraints. Findings are discussed in terms of the relative organism-environment coupling to sustain an adaptive behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article overviews several contemporary models that assume power law scaling is a plausible description of the skewed right tails that are typical of response time distributions. The properties and markers of these distribution functions have implications for cognitive and neurophysiological dynamics. The power law hypothesis suggests studies should collect larger samples, and that analyses may combine individual subjects' data into a single set for a distribution-function contrasts. Techniques for contrasting response time measurements are illustrated on data from a previously published study comparing the performance of children diagnosed with dyslexia and a group of age-matched controls in flanker, color naming, word naming, and arithmetic performance.