While parameters are crucial components of cognitive models, relatively little importance has been given to their units. We show that this has lead to some parameters to be contaminated, introducing an artifactual correlation between them. We also show that this has led to the illegal comparison of parameters with different units of measurement - this may invalidate parameter comparisons across participants, conditions, groups, or studies. We demonstrate that this problem affects two related models: Stevens' power law and Rachlin's delay discounting model. We show that it may even affect models which superficially avoid the incompatible units problem, such as hyperbolic discounting. We present simulation results to demonstrate the extent of the issues caused by the muddled units problem. We offer solutions in order to avoid the problem in the future or to aid in re-interpreting existing datasets.

中文翻译：

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时间折扣中的单位混乱的情况。

尽管参数是认知模型的关键组成部分，但对其单元的重视程度相对较低。我们表明，这已导致某些参数被污染，从而在它们之间引入了人为关联。我们还表明，这导致参数与不同度量单位的非法比较-这可能会使参与者，条件，组或研究之间的参数比较无效。我们证明了这个问题影响了两个相关模型：史蒂文斯的幂定律和拉赫林的延迟折扣模型。我们表明，它甚至可能影响从表面上避免不相容单位问题（例如双曲线折扣）的模型。我们目前的仿真结果来证明由混乱的单元问题引起的问题的程度。